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MY STUDY 



AND OTHER ESSAYS 



BY 



AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 

PROFESSOR EMERITUS IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 




NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1886 



,Vs 






Copyright, 1885, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



11-3 



mi 



ELECTROTTPED AND PRINTED 

BY RAND, AVERY, & COMPANY, 

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The discussions contained in this volume are in 
great part republished from various periodicals. They 
have been so greatly enlarged, however, that nearly 
one-half of the material is new. The large space 
given to the subject of future retribution and kindred 
themes, is the natural sequence of the revival of 
public interest in them in recent years. Some rep- 
etitions of thought will be observed, which could 
scarcely have been avoided in essays of this kind 
which do not profess to be a continuous treatise. 
Such material has been eliminated wherever it could be 
without damage to the argument in hand. The author 
can give no better reason for this republication than 
the request of many correspondents, strangers to him, 
and the hope that the enlargement of the essays may 
render them more helpful to minds interested in the 
class of subjects to which they belong. 



CONTENTS. 



NUMBER PAGE 

I. My Study (I.) 1 

II. My Study (II.) 13 

III. My Study (III.) . 27 

IV. Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs . . 31 
V. Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution, 42 

VI. Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere . . 53 

VII. St. Paul on Retribution 69 

VIII. Correctives of Popular Faith in Retribu- 
tion (I.) 84 

IX. CORRECTIVES OF POPULAR FAITH IN RETRIBU- 
TION (II.) 97 

X. Retribution in the Light of Reason (I.) . . Ill 

XI. Retribution in the Light of Reason (II.) . .125 

XII. Endless Sin under the Government of God . 138 

XIII. The Hypothesis of a Second Probation . . . 154 

XIV. Scholastic Theories of Inspiration 169 

XV. The New-England Clergy and the Anti- 
slavery Reform (I.) 179 

XVI. The New-England Clergy and the Anti- 
slavery Reform (II.) 194 

XVII. Massachusetts and the Quakers 214 

XVIII. Does the World move ? 232 

v 



vi Contents. 

NUMBER PAGE 

XIX. Is the Christian Life worth living? .... 245 
XX. A Study of the Episcopal Church (I.) . . . 262 
XXI. A Study of the Episcopal Church (II.) ... 273 
XXII, Prayer as a State of Christian Living ... 288 
XXIII. 'Why do I believe Christianity to be a Reve- 
lation from God ? 309 



MY STUDY. 



My Study: and Other Essays. 



i. 

MY STUDY. 

PART I. 



It has been my lot to live for thirty years on a 
spot which has been the scene of a great, though 
unwritten, history. At the time when Andover 
Seminary was founded, as is well known, the old 
faith of New England was decadent. Its stanch 
friends were few. But one of the old churches of 
Boston was loyal to it. Even that one was of the 
school which, in the church-history of Scotland, 
is significantly titled " moderate." Its aged pastor 
was not the man to lift up a fallen banner, and 
lead a forlorn hope. A few godly men resolved 
that there should be one school of biblical learn- 
ing in New England where a collegiately educated 
and orthodox clergy could be trained for the de- 
fense of the theology of the Pilgrims. 

The "house I live in" was one of those built 
for the professors of the new " divinity school." 

l 



2 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Its occupant, in his daily walk to his lecture-room, 
leaped from stone to stone through the swamp of 
a whortleberry lot in which Phillips Hall stood. 
The driver of the daily stage to the metropolis 
used to point out to his merry passengers the 
hillock on which the hall was erected as " Brim- 
stone Hill," in token of the fiery and nauseous 
theology which he had been told was taught there. 
The tradition is, that one of the passengers on a 
wintry day responded by thrusting his hands out 
of the window, as if to warm them at a blazing 
fire. The sobriquet followed Dr. Griffin to the pas- 
torate, to which he was soon called, of the Park- 
street Church in Boston. "Brimstone Corner" 
was the polite and fragrant cognomen which the 
angle of Tremont and Park Streets bore in the 
popular dialect of the time. 

The late Charles Stoddard, Esq., of Boston, for 
many years the senior deacon of the Old South 
Church, has told me that he was more than once 
crowded off the sidewalk by well-dressed enemies 
of his faith while leading his mission school to 
church on a Sunday morning. It was not the first 
nor the last time that " fanatics " have found that 
they had no rights which " gentlemen " were bound 
to respect. A drayman in Tremont Street, who 
had missed his way with a load of sulphur, was 
once directed by a gentleman, of whom he made 
inquiry at a crossing, to go and deliver his freight 
at the house of a man by the name of Griffin 
which he would find on the door-plate, for "he 



My Study. 3 

was the chief dealer in the article in the city of 
Boston." 

So general and intense was the antipathy to the 
ancient faith, that it swayed the learned profes- 
sions, and gave tone to cultivated society. Young 
men beginning the practice of law or medicine in 
Boston found that they lost caste by attending an 
Orthodox church. When Andover Seminary was 
founded, it was doubtful whether a charter could 
be obtained from the Legislature. The institution 
was therefore attached as an annex to Phillips 
Academy, which already had a charter. Ten years 
later, when Amherst College was founded in the 
interest of the same religious views with those 
represented at Andover, the petition for a charter 
was again and again refused. The same was true 
when a charter was sought for the American Board 
for Foreign Missions. 

The bitterness of that controversy was no more 
acrid than that which commonly attends the be- 
ginnings of religious disruptions. But such were 
the spirits in the air of Massachusetts when Dr. 
Griffin was called to Andover. In the building of 
his study he had a magnificent ideal of a working- 
room for a studious recluse. It filled the southern 
wing of the house. The morning sun greeted its 
eastern windows ; the noonday sun gave it good 
cheer as he traveled southward; and the setting 
sun flooded it with a golden glory, in which few 
horizons equal that of Andover. The glow which 
illumined it from sun to sun was a fit emblem of 



4 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the light which was to go from it around the 
world. 

Dr. Griffin never occupied it. He was called 
to the pulpit of the Park-street Church just as he 
was about to take possession. Dr. Porter, his suc- 
cessor, was a lifelong invalid. Meetings of the 
faculty and others for conference were therefore 
held in his study. Thus the spot became memo- 
rable. The few leading minds who felt the gravity 
of the crisis in the history of our churches felt, 
also, the need of concentration of resources and 
of mutual alliance. For this purpose they estab- 
lished, in 1812, a weekly meeting for prayer and 
consultation. Its chief object was to devise ways 
and means of lifting the old faith of New England 
from the obsolescence into which it was falling. 
Then, as now, men called it " moribund." There 
are things which thrive in dying. That meeting 
was continued for many years, and was generally 
held in Dr. Porter's study. I find evidence of but 
one occasion on which it was held elsewhere. 

During all that time that little conclave at An- 
dover was the center of New-England Calvinism. 
Its regular attendants were seven : Dr. Woods ; 
Professor Stuart ; Dr. Porter ; Samuel Farrar, Esq., 
who was then the treasurer of the seminary, and 
one of the lay-theologians of the time ; Dr. John 
Adams, father of the late Rev. William Adams, 
D.D., of New York, and then principal of Phillips 
Academy ; Dr. Justin Edwards, the youthful pastor 
of the Old South Church in Andover ; and Mark 



My Study. 5 

Newman, Esq., its senior deacon. To these should 
be added, as occasional guests, Dr. Griffin of Bos- 
ton ; Dr. Pierson of Andover ; Dr. Worcester of 
Salem ; Dr. Morse of Charlestown ; Dr. Spring of 
Newburyport ; and, at a later period, Dr. Wisner 
of the Old South Church in Boston ; and Jeremiah 
Evarts, " the silent man," father of the present 
Hon. William M. Evarts of New York. These 
came, as occasion called them, to consult with the 
wise men on " Brimstone Hill." 

In that thoughtful and devout conference were 
started the germs of great ideas. Here, as I write, 
those grave and reverend men seem to sit around 
me in grand council. I see their earnest faces. 
I hear their awe-struck voices as they kneel in 
prayer. I listen to their solid and growing thought 
as they talk of fruitful schemes, and throw out 
spontaneously the seed-thoughts of institutions 
which are to take their place in God's plans for 
building states and redeeming nations. 

There sits Dr. Woods, slow and bland in speech, 
wise in counsel, safe in act, and masterly in com- 
promise. Here stands or walks about, peering at 
the books, Professor Stuart, on whom, as he used 
to say, " The doctorate would never stick." He is 
quick in movement, original in plan, and intrepid 
in execution. The same mercurial traits appear 
in his professional character which made him the 
most agile athlete in Yale College fifteen years 
before. His alert mind keeps his tall, gaunt body 
in incessant motion. His head is never still. He 



6 My Study: and Other Essays. 

rises to shut the door if it is open, and to open it 
if it is shut, or to work off the overplus of nerve 
by a needless thrust at the fire. He hurries on 
the business lest he should not live to see it 
matured. He is one of the chronic invalids who 
live in daily lookout for death, and who disappoint 
themselves by living as he did beyond the full 
threescore and ten. 

Dr. Porter presides, erect, vigilant, and urbane. 
He is precise to a fault in the proprieties of time 
and place. His hollow cough is premonitory of 
the end yet twenty years away. Dr. Justin Ed- 
wards, of tall, angular frame, which moves like an 
ox, is silent till all the rest have had their say. 
Then he sums up the gist of the matter in a few 
terse words, which give the practical outcome of 
the business in hand. His colleagues recognize in 
his remarks the very wisdom they would have said 
if they had thought to put it so. There are men 
who are created to be chairmen of committees. 
They are born executives. As such they are great 
men. Other things they do — as they do. Dr. 
Edwards was one of them. Had he been bred to 
the bar, he would have found his way to the bench. 
In ancient Athens he would have been one of the 
Amphictyonic Council. 

Great and good men invite caricature. The 
world does not caricature imbeciles. I remember 
seeing in my youth a rude woodcut representing 
the three leading spirits of the Andover Seminary. 
It portrayed their differences, if not reverently, 



My Study. 7 

yet not untruthfully. As I recall it, after forty 
years, it pictured a huge, clumsy machine, such 
as was then used for winnowing wheat. Doctors 
Porter and Woods and Professor Stuart are hard 
at work with it, dressed in the professional robe 
and bands. Dr. Woods is carefully, yet smilingly, 
as if he entered into the joke of the thing, drop- 
ping into the hopper pumpkins of goodly size, 
which have a rude carving on them of human 
faces. They remind one of the Jack-o'-lanterns 
we used to carve with jack-knives in harvest time 
when the pumpkin-fields were golden. Dr. Porter 
is picking them up with stately bend as they roll 
out from below in the form of little preachers, 
also full dressed in canonical bands and robe ; and 
he daintily brushes off the dust with a whisk- 
broom. Professor Stuart is working with might 
and main, with the impetuous look of a man who 
is putting his whole soul into it, turning the 
crank, and bending almost double. To use his 
own favorite phrase, he is "totus in Mis" Dr. 
Woods exclaims with anxious drawl, " Not-so-fast, 
Broth-er Stu-art, not-so-fast ! " The professor 
replies with a jerk, " Work away ! work away ! " 
Such were the pleasantries behind which conflict 
was going on in dead earnest. 

The caricatures of an age, like its coins, are 
signs of its most truthful history. These men 
could afford to be caricatured. We may be very 
sure that they did not look glum over it. Grave 
men they were, who took life intensely ; but they 



8 My Study: and Other Essays. 

were not of that class of devotees who, in a parox- 
ysm of remorse, resolve that they will never laugh 
again. They were of too robust grain to be men 
of disconsolate and despotic conscience. They 
were believers in the inspiration of the Old Testa- 
ment, and they took it literally that " fliere is a 
time to laugh." They were men before they were 
theologians ; and they had their comic side, like 
other men. They suffered no paralysis of the ris- 
ible muscles. Dr. Porter I never saw: he had 
passed on before my time. But from what I know 
of the other two, and of their associates in the 
Andover Council, I can readily imagine that they 
at some time relieved the gravity of their long 
session by a canvass of the uncouth picture, and 
a hearty laugh over the likenesses so truth-telling 
of their leaders. 

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I 
have been informed of an incident which confirms 
it, and which discloses a new side to the character 
of Dr. Woods. On one occasion he was seen 
standing before a shop-window in Cornhill, exam- 
ining this same caricature of himself and his col- 
leagues. He was so intent upon it, that he did 
not at first perceive the approach of Dr. Ware, — 
his chief opponent in the controversy of the time, 
— who came up behind him. Dr. Ware at length 
tapped him on the shoulder, and said, " Good- 
morning, Dr. Woods. I see that you have a new 
machine at Andover, by which you manufacture 
Orthodox ministers out of pumpkins." — " Ye-s," 



My Study. 9 

said Dr. Woods, with his inimitable deliberation 
of utterance, " ye-s : don't-you-want-to-come- 
up-there, and-be-ground-over ? " The sequence 
need not be told. Good-nature diluted the bitter- 
ness of that honorable warfare on both sides. 

Those ancient men builded better than they 
knew, and some of them knew a great deal. Like 
all religiously earnest men, they thought and 
planned and acted for far-off coming time. Their 
life was energized by their faith that this world 
is to be converted to Jesus Christ. Their hands 
were on the wheels of its destiny, and they knew 
it. They felt the prophetic thrill of it in every 
nerve. They had faith in themselves as men 
chosen of God to apostolic service. There are 
men in the service of the Church whom the Church 
lifts: there are other men who lift the Church. 
Those Andover pioneers were of the latter class. 
They had a work of construction and of forecast 
to do, and they did it with a will. 

It is said that every great discovery is a pre- 
sentiment in somebody's mind before it is a fact 
in recorded science. That Andover company con- 
tained minds of the premonitory order. They were 
in profound sympathy with the biblical future of 
this world. When the prophetic book was un- 
sealed, they were ready with the ways and means 
for executing its decrees. Had they been prophets, 
and sons of prophets, they could not have entered 
into the spirit of the opening age more cordially or 
more intelligently. Their life's work was prophecy 



10 My Study: and Other Ussays. 

fulfilled. Thej worked as all great workers do, 
in line with hidden providences and supernatural 
forces. 

It was in that conference in Dr. Porter's study, 
that the project of American missions to the hea- 
then first took the visible and tangible form which 
gave rise to the American Board. Judson, Nott, 
Newell, and Mills, the pioneer missionaries, were 
in the seminary. Their petition to the General 
Association of Massachusetts for support in their 
resolve to preach the gospel to the heathen was 
drawn up by the advice of the Andover brethren 
in council, who sent two of their number to advo- 
cate it before the fathers at Bradford. It is sig- 
nificant of the wary enterprise which it was 
thought necessary to practice in broaching the 
subject, that the names of Rice and Richards, 
which were at first appended to the memorial, 
were struck off, lest the Association should be 
alarmed by too large a number. 

It is only in the beginnings of great movements 
that a timid diplomacy sways action. When the 
idea central to the movement gets possession of 
the popular mind, it goes with a rush. In the 
multitude of counselors all feel safe. Grooves of 
destiny begin to appear, and safety insures speed. 
Such was the early history of American missions. 
The prophetic thought at Andover anticipated 
what was coming. The group behind the hay- 
stack at Williamstown had adjourned to Andover, 
to find their plans matured, and purpose deepened, 



My Study. 11 

by the inspiration which came from Dr. Porter's 
study. 

One feature of the movement is significant of 
the moral pressure under which both the missiona- 
ries and their advisers acted. Under the guidance 
of their Andover counselors, the young mission- 
aries did not leave their going to the heathen 
dependent on the readiness of the Massachusetts 
churches to send them. Their going was a foregone 
conclusion. Go they must : it was fore-ordained. 
If Massachusetts had not consecrated wealth 
enough to send them, the Lord had. Could not 
God raise up men after his own heart from the 
very stones in the streets of Bradford ? 

What was the secret of the intense conviction 
in the Andover conclave, that the gospel must be 
preached to the darkened nations ? It was their 
faith that this is a lost world. Without Christ it 
is doomed. They saw in vision the long proces- 
sion of heathen souls unsaved passing on into a 
lost eternity. They were wakened to a great exi- 
gency. It brooked no delay. No dream of hea- 
then probation after death blurred the vividness 
of their faith. Whatever may be true on that 
subject, their faith was fixed. They were a unit 
in it. So were the founders of the seminary and 
the churches of Massachusetts. The whole splen- 
did structure of American missions to the heathen, 
with its magnificent history of achievement, had 
its origin in a profound, undoubting, intense, and 
unanimous belief that heathen probation began 
and ended here. 



12 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Was the Andover Creed silent about it? It 
said as little of the Book of Mormon. Polygamy 
could as normally be taught under its sanction as 
the discovery of a second probation. They were 
silent where they saw no reason to speak. They 
were practical men. It is not the way with prac- 
tical men to build cob houses of defense against 
errors of which nobody has ever dreamed. Their 
action said more than their polemic words. It 
discloses where and how the wheels of their sys- 
tem of beliefs interlocked. Their whole missionary 
policy revolved around their faith in the restriction 
of heathen probation to this one life in this one 
world. Without that faith, that whole chapter in 
the history of those times would have been a fable. 
Those pioneer missionaries would have sought pas- 
torates in the Green Mountains and among the 
hills of Berkshire. Their advisers in the Andover 
Conference would have rolled up the map of the 
heathen world, and put it away for ever. 

They were not so taught of God. Their intense 
faith disclosed itself in a monumental work which 
continues to this day. Had it been the whole life's 
work of those seven men to bring into organized 
being the ideal of American missions to the hea- 
then, they would have lived in the history of the 
millennium ; but that was not the whole. 



n. 

MY STUDY. 
part n. 

I have told the story of the way in which my 
study became memorable in the history of the 
Massachusetts churches, and of its tribute to the 
organization of American missions to the heathen. 
Other institutions followed in natural sequence. 

Here was originated the American Monthly Con- 
cert of Prayer for the conversion of the world. 
Something similar to it in Scotland had caught the 
eye of the Andover watchmen in their lookout for 
new ideas. It was talked over and prayed over in 
this place. Grave doubts were expressed. Would 
the churches feel interest enough in the heathen 
to meet and pray for them once a month ? The 
resolve to send four missionaries abroad was re- 
garded by many as a doubtful movement. Dr. 
Dwight, president of Yale College, thought it un- 
wise. So grave had the responsibility seemed, to 
those who must bear it, that one who was present 
when the memorial of the young missionaries was 
read, says, " We all held our breath." At the first 
meeting of the American Board at Farmington, 

13 



14 My Study: and Other Essays. 

a private parlor held all who were in attendance. 
They were just six persons. The prospect was 
not cheering to men of little faith. 

What to do at a monthly concert to give it a 
distinctive character was an open question. One 
pastor of those times, in relating his pastoral remi- 
niscences, said, " At our first monthly concert we 
could think of nothing to do but to read the clos- 
ing prophecies of Isaiah." Even the missionary 
hymn was not then known to the American 
churches. Would the missions achieve success 
enough to sustain such a concert ? If they failed, 
what would be the effect of the re-action ? The 
heathen were a great way off. The experiment 
was a novelty. It had no history of success to 
reason from. Would it not be wise to wait until 
it had? 

The wise men of Andover saw the two sides of 
things. But they were not of dilatory habit when 
the balance was once struck. They had committed 
themselves at Bradford to the project of missions 
to the heathen, and now the way to create a his- 
tory of success was to back them up by concerted 
prayer. Any thing must succeed which was sup- 
ported by supernatural auxiliaries. So they rea- 
soned. A circular was sent forth to the churches, 
and the monthly concert found an unexpected 
welcome. 

Where else in the wide world did so grand and 
far-reaching an institution ever spring from a be- 
ginning so diminutive ? Seven men, unknown to 



My Study. 15 

fame, meet for a plain talk in a private house in a 
country-town of Massachusetts, and their plain 
talk soon weaves an electric network of concerted 
prayer around the globe. Response comes from 
the islands of Pacific seas, and rejoinder from 
Constantinople and " flowery Ispahan." 

The monthly concert was followed by the an- 
nual Concert of Prayer for Colleges. This also was 
one of the creative ideas which went forth from 
Dr. Porter's study. When we recall the religious 
awakenings in our colleges which have so often fol- 
lowed that anniversary, beginning at the very hour 
of its observance, we can not but revere the inspi- 
ration which put that thought into the minds of 
the men who gathered in this place to inquire of 
God. That idea of the combination of the forces 
of prayer for world-wide objects became from that 
time fixed in the spiritual policy of our churches. 
Then we first discovered what reduplicated power 
concert gives to religious enterprise. Concert in 
prayer reproduced itself in concerted action. It 
was enough to crown any man's life's work to 
initiate that conception as an executive factor in 
Christian history. It is the most significant illus- 
tration on record of the spiritual unity of the 
Church, and of its command of invisible resources. 

In 1813 one of that vigilant band met with a 
little book which interested him by its compression 
of large materials into little space and portable 
form. The thought struck him, that religious lit- 
erature may be made cheaper in cost, and cir- 



16 My Study: and Other Essays. 

culated widely. He laid the matter before the 
Andover fraternity, and soon it grew into work- 
ing-shape in the New-England Tract Society. 
Andover was the seat of its operations till 1825, 
when it became the American Tract Society at New 
York. 

A little incident has come to my knowledge 
which illustrates the range of forethought, from 
great to small, and from small to great, which char- 
acterized the enterprise of those men. Professor 
Stuart was then just at the outset of his splendid 
career as the Father of Biblical Literature in 
America. He was absorbed in the construction of 
Hebrew grammars and the conquest of German 
learning. He * was teaching his own printers to 
set up Hebrew types. Yet he found time to super- 
vise the first edition of American tracts, and he 
writes to the binder to be sure and make the cov- 
ers attractive to the reader. He believed with 
George Herbert, that nothing is small in God's ser- 
vice ; and so said they all. 

Dr. Porter was the son of the Hon. Judge Por- 
ter of Tinmouth, Vt. On one of his visits to his 
father, he heard of a little local society for the 
aid of young men in their education for the min- 
istry. He called to it the attention of the next 
conference at Andover. There, as usual, the idea 
from the Green Mountains expanded into that of 
a national organization. A meeting was called in 
Boston, at which four of the Andover professors 
were appointed to draught a constitution, under 



My Study. 17 

which substantially the American Education Society 
has been in operation seventy years. It has aided 
in their training for the pulpit more than seven 
thousand men, most of whom could not otherwise 
have given to the Church the service of educated 
mind. More than one-half of the ordained mis- 
sionaries of the American Board have been of their 
number, as well as many pastors of metropolitan 
churches, and many presidents and professors of 
our schools of learning. 

We often laud and magnify the religious news- 
papers of our land. They rival the pulpit in moral 
power. The first weekly religious newspaper in 
the world was originated in the Andover conclave. 
The way in which it came about gives us a 
glimpse of the simple and natural processes by 
which great things were done there. Such things 
are not done by such men with blast of bugle, and 
beat of drum. On one evening the desecration of 
the Lord's Day comes up for discussion. A German 
conclave on the same topic would have appointed 
a committee to go home, and consider and inquire 
and investigate and collate and report on the na- 
ture of the Christian sabbath, and what constitutes 
its desecration. One of the Andover brethren, 
with quick Saxon sense, asks, " What can be done 
about it ? " Another replies, " Let us prepare 
short, pithy articles on the subject, and print them 
in the newspapers." A third responds, "Not a 
newspaper in the land would publish them." Then 
comes the upshot of the whole business, "It is 



18 My Study: and Other Essays. 

high time that we had a newspaper that will." 
Here was " The Boston Recorder " in embryo ; the 
original of " The Congregationalist," and the pio- 
neer of all kindred publications in the world. 
Said Dr. Morse, in writing to Mr. Farrar soon 
after, " We depend on you at Andover to ripen 
the plan. We are ready to unite in carrying it 
into execution." 

It was the mission of that group at Andover to 
"ripen plans" of great things with small begin- 
nings. Theirs were inventive and constructive 
minds. They illustrated the fact, of which Mr. 
Froude has made emphatic mention, that hard- 
headed Calvinist thinkers are long-headed, practi- 
cal workers. In their thinking, they exalted God : 
in their working, God honored them. They illus- 
trated also the fact, so often observed in unwritten 
history, that earnest men, by simply walking in 
the way of duty, and doing that which most 
imperatively needs to be done, will inevitably do 
great things. They can not help it. The plain 
way of duty is the highway of greatness. The 
word " ought " is kindred to every great thing in 
the universe. 

They have a custom, in the villages on the 
Rhine, of anchoring a grist-mill in the middle of 
the river, where the current is strongest, and 
making the rapids grind the food of the whole 
community. The river is a docile laborer. "It 
asks for no wages," threatens no strikes, and never 
quits work for a carouse. It puts into the mill a 



My Study. 19 

power independent of drawbacks, and which has 
no caprices. So let any man plant himself in the 
midstream of God's plans, and take manful grip 
at the thing that first comes to hand, working 
with a will at it, and the current of eternal decree 
will impart its own momentum to his work, so that 
it will grow into grand achievement. The law of 
spiritual gravitation works in line with such men. 
Every such man stands in the thick of godlike 
opportunity. So was it with the simple-minded 
yet eager men of the Andover brotherhood. They 
seized the thought which came from God to them 
through the exigency of the time, and did their 
duty about it like men ; and great things came of it. 
It was not the scintillation of meteoric genius : it 
was the gravitation of consecrated common sense. 
It was more than the founding of an empire to 
pioneer into the world the weekly religious press. 
In a similar manner the American Home Mission- 
ary Society came to its birth on this spot. The 
need of pastors for feeble churches was imperative. 
Pioneer preachers for the founding of churches in 
the waste places of the West were wanted. It 
was the ambition of the men at Andover to send 
an educated ministry westward as fast as emigra- 
tion could blaze trees for roadways through the 
wilderness. But how should the churches in 
regions where commerce was carried on by barter, 
support pastors who had nothing that was worth 
barter? It was a grave question. But to the 
inventive enterprise of the Andover circle, to ask 



20 My Study: and Other Essays. 

it was to answer it. It was not their way to 
moon oyer difficulties. 

There had been for a considerable time local 
societies, scattered here and there, limited by State 
and county lines, for the aid of feeble churches. 
In a single evening the deliberations at Andover 
matured a plan for making those isolated associa- 
tions auxiliary to a national institution which 
should lift the work up into national importance. 
The American Home Missionary Society was the 
result of that evening's session. At this date it 
has assisted nearly five thousand churches. Most 
of these have been in localities which could not 
otherwise have received the ministrations of the 
gospel in season to give character to the great 
States of the North- West. Many of them were 
planted at strategic points at which the dominant 
moral power ruled the infancy of those States. 
Here, again, great effects from little causes are 
illustrated in the history of that fragment of the 
olden time which we are reviewing. 

No more magnificent illustration of the same 
thing can be found than that furnished by the his- 
tory of the temperance reform. It is not generally 
known that all the organizations now existing 
for the promotion of abstinence from intoxicating 
liquors owe their origin ultimately to the Andover 
Conference. 

Things happened in this wise : in 1814 Dr. Ed- 
wards formed in his congregation a society called 
"The Andover South Parish Society for doing 



My Study. 21 

good." The homeliness of its title suggests the 
simplicity of its aim. One object named in its 
constitution was "to promote temperance." His 
afterthought was, that that method of " doing 
good " was capable of expansion. He brought it 
to the notice of his colleagues in Dr. Porter's 
study. The result was the formation of a society 
entitled " An Association of Heads of Families for 
the Promotion of Temperance." The first seven 
names signed to its pledge of total abstinence 
were those of members of the little fraternity 
whose life's work is here recorded. That was the 
first organized movement in the world founded on the 
pledge of entire abstinence from intoxicating drinks. 
The same consultations led circuitously to the 
founding of the American Temperance Society. 
For several years the Andover brotherhood num- 
bered among its members Rev. Dr. Hewitt, whose 
career as the " apostle of temperance " has been 
equaled by no one but that of John B. Gough. 
His eloquence is remembered to this day, by those 
who heard it, as something wonderful in the his- 
tory of public debate. 

Few things illustrate so signally the progressive 
ideas of those far-seeing men as these pioneer 
efforts for a revolution in the drinking-customs 
of the world. The earlier associations for the pur- 
pose, besides being limited in locality, all touched 
only the surface of the evil which they attempted 
to remove. They were all founded on the princi- 
ple of temperance, not only as distinct from, but 



22 My Study: and Other Essays. 

as opposed to, abstinence. The moderate use of 
intoxicants they encouraged. This was universal 
in the drinking-usages of society. Its effect had 
become alarming in its prognostications of the 
future. An aged clergyman, who had been in 
his prime at that period, once remarked in my 
hearing, " It was a wonder that we did not become 
a generation of drunkards." Intoxication among 
gentlemen of culture and refinement was too fre- 
quent to excite surprise, or to provoke censure. 
Everybody was expected to make the slip some- 
times. Lawyers came to the bar, and judges to the 
bench, and ministers to the pulpit, occasionally in 
a state of inebriation. Young preachers at their 
ordination were sometimes charged not to allow 
themselves to be intoxicated by the hospitality of 
their parishioners. 

The late Rev. Dr. Hill of Virginia once related 
his experience in his first pastorate substantially 
as follows ; viz., he rode in the saddle through 
the outlying districts of his parish, to make his 
first acquaintance with his people. At every 
farmhouse the decanter and the wineglass were 
forthcoming. The good people knew no better 
way of entertaining their pastor than to make him 
drunk. He perceived as the afternoon wore on, 
that he found it difficult to mount his horse. He 
saw both sides of him at once. He at length said 
to himself, " John " (if I have his baptismal name 
correctly), " this will never do: you'll be a drunk- 
ard before you know it." That advance into an 



My Study, 23 

inebriate ministry was cut short, and a good man 
saved. 

Such was the peril everywhere attendant on a 
young preacher's career. The popular theory was, 
that to abstain wholly from spirituous liquors was 
cowardice ; to remove the decanters from the side- 
board was parsimony ; and to pledge one's self or 
others to total abstinence was a sin against the 
example of our Lord. 

Even so late as 1844 the clergy of Scotland 
were not emancipated from the old regime, if in- 
deed they are now. When the reverend deputa- 
tion from the " Free Church " came to this country 
to solicit aid, their countrymen in Boston regaled 
them with the national punch-bowl. Rev. Dr. 
Cunningham, in rehearsing afterwards his impres- 
sions of New England, said in substance, "Your 
free churches are a surprise to me, your frame- 
houses are a novelty, and your whisky is execrable." 

Nobody thought of disturbing the time-honored 
custom of moderate drinking, associated as it was 
with the marriages and funerals and public festivi- 
ties and private rejoicings of many generations, 
till that little company of " fanatics " appeared at 
Andover. The pledge of one clerical association 
in Massachusetts whose members were frightened 
at the increase of drunkenness among themselves, 
ran thus : " We solemnly pledge ourselves not to 
use more of intoxicating beverages than we con- 
scientiously believe to be good for us ! " Could 
the ." National Association of Brewers," in their 



24 My Study: and Other Essays. 

late crusade against prohibitory legislation, ask for 
a more satisfactory pledge than that ? Look into 
the pamphlets and magazines and sermons of those 
days, and you will find that the Lord's Supper and 
the marriage at Cana were used as an absolute 
embargo on all efforts to discourage the moderate 
use of rum. It is more than a twice-told tale, that 
New-England rum and New-England missionaries 
went abroad in the same brig, and nobody saw the 
farce of it. 

The temperance societies at Andover, and after 
them the national society at New York, were 
formed upon the idea of keeping temperate people 
temperate by entire abstinence. Of this idea a 
European writer, quoted by the late Rev. Dr. 
Jackson of the Massachusetts Board of Educa- 
tion, —-to whose researches I am indebted for 
many of the facts here narrated, — writes, " On 
whose mind this great truth first rose is not 
known. Whoever he was, peace to his memory ! 
He has done more for the world than he who en- 
riched it by the discovery of a new continent." 

The fact undoubtedly is, that that radical re- 
formatory idea was originated by some one of the 
pioneer reformers at Andover. Certain it is, that 
they first gave to it a practical development in a 
great organization of world-wide influence. 

As a whole, those septemviri were a rare group 
of men, fitted into a rare juncture of opportuni- 
ties in the history of the times. Most of them 
were not extraordinary men, except as the crisis 



My Study. 25 

they were called to meet, and the duties they set 
their hands to, made them such. They belonged 
to that class of men whose fidelity to duty in 
emergencies lifts them above the level of their 
own ambitions, and surprises the world by their 
unlooked-for achievement. The very magnitude 
of the ideas which the work of the hour pressed 
upon them weighted them with such a sense of 
responsibility, that they could not help living in- 
tensely, and working out grand results. They had 
inherited the old notion of the Pilgrims, of living 
and working for the whole world, and for all 
coming time-s. They lived in sight of all future 
generations. The glory of a " latter day " gilded 
their horizon. 

Such is the early history of my study. Such 
are the inspirations which float in the atmosphere 
around me. In a certain corner near my table, 
to which my eye turns with reverent sympathy, 
Dr. Porter, just as he was giving a farewell kiss 
to his adopted son, breathed his last. His associ- 
ates in those hallowed gatherings have since then 
all gone to their rest. Their works do follow 
them. A great cloud of witnesses come in at my 
windows to tell me what Andover was in the olden 
time. I am reminded of what Wordsworth says 
of some of England's historic names, of men " who 
called Milton friend : " — 

" Great men have been among us ; hands that penned, 
And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none.'' 



26 My Study : and Other Essays. 

Another generation and still another have taken 
their places, to testify what Andover is. The re- 
sults of the comparison can be known only in that 
day when the "fire shall try every man's work, 
of what sort it is." 



in. 

MY STUDY. 

PART III. 

Since the foregoing narratives were published 
in " The Congregationalist," the accuracy of their 
statements has been questioned in two particulars. 
One is that of the origin of the first religious news- 
paper. I find, on investigation of all the facts at 
my command, that the question is more com- 
plicated than I supposed. Three or four " Rich- 
monds are in the field." The decision turns on 
three inquiries ; viz., What is a religious news- 
paper, properly so called? when was the first 
weekly religious newspaper founded? and when 
did the first weekly religious newspaper begin, 
which lived, and has made for itself a history ? 

Now, it is true that the art of printing existed 
before the Andover conclave ; it is true that a reli- 
gious periodical, founded partially for the purposes 
of our present religious newspapers, and issued 
fortnightly, preceded " The Boston Recorder ; " 
and it is true that another attempt to create such 
a paper preceded the Andover movement, and its 
result was short-lived. But I am satisfied, after 



28 My Study : and Other Essay*. 

reading, as I believe, all that can be said on the 
three or four sides of the question, that the Ando- 
ver men believed that their movement was entirely 
original. They did not consciously follow in the 
track of any predecessor. It is nearly, if not quite, 
as certain that, understanding by the term " news- 
paper " the thoroughly equipped and broadly aimed 
organ which we now mean by it, " The Boston 
Recorder" was the first weekly periodical of the 
kind which lived to create for itself a history. It 
was the first, not only in this country, but, so far 
as I know, in the world. Thus stands the matter 
at present. The details of the evidence would 
hardly interest the public. 

The other particular is the origin of the idea of 
making abstinence, and not temperate drinking, the 
basis of organized effort for the promotion of tem- 
perance. Here, again, I find ample evidence that 
the Andover men believed themselves to be the ori- 
ginal pioneers in that direction. They were con- 
scious of no indebtedness to anybody for the idea. 
Yet to us at this day the idea is so patent and so 
necessary that we can readily believe that it may 
have occurred to scores of other minds, and may 
have been given to the public in speeches and ser- 
mons on the alarming increase of intemperance. 
Our wonder is, that any other idea should have 
been dominant among the friends of temperance. 
But I can find no evidence whatever that any 
organization founded on the pledge of total absti- 
nence preceded the two mentioned in my narrative, 



My Study. 29 

as created at Andover. The probability is, that 
the idea was original with Dr. Edwards, and that 
his associates co-operated with him in forming the 
local societies referred to. It is certain, also, that 
the consultations here led to consultations else- 
where, out of which all the efficient temperance 
societies in the land grew. 

All such questions of priority, in originating 
great movements for the growth of civilization, 
involve the same principles which are involved in 
the claim of Columbus to the discovery of Amer- 
ica. Probably more than one sophomore in college 
has believed that he has made a great discovery in 
the fact that Columbus did not discover the New 
World, and that the Northmen did. But history 
has again and again pricked such bubbles by rec- 
ognizing two things. One is, that a great idea 
usually is original to more than one discoverer. 
Great ideas come when the world needs them. 
They surround the world's ignorance, and press 
for admission. They succeed in making an aper- 
ture for themselves through many minds to which 
they are original, perhaps as much so to one as to 
another. It has become a truism, therefore, that 
great discoveries must be contested as to priority 
in time. 

The other principle is, that the honor of the dis- 
covery is clue to him w^ho first puts the novel idea 
for which the world is waiting into such working- 
form as to make it practically valuable to man- 
kind. The inventions of the mariner's compass 



80 My Study : and Other Essays. 

and of movable types are not properly credited to 
the Chinese inventors who first gave them being, 
and then dropped them into the conservative 
abyss. They are to be credited to the European 
minds which first made them factors in the world's 
civilization. So the discovery of America is not 
due to the Northmen who first made it, but did 
nothing with it but to gape at it. It is due to 
Columbus, who first used it to bring the old and 
new worlds together, and to open savage wilds to 
the crowded populations of other continents. 

On the same principles, and by the same tests, 
the men of the Andover Conference are entitled 
justly to all that has been claimed for them. The 
vital points in the claim are two : first, that they 
were consciously original in the great ideas which 
they conceived ; secondly, that they were the prac- 
tical pioneers who first put those ideas to use in 
institutions which have lived to create a history. 



IV. 
VIBRATORY PROGRESS IN RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. 

The world's advances in great ideas commonly 
imitate the movement of a pendulum. Conquest 
of a great principle is rarely made and held fast 
in its healthy and balanced mean till the human 
mind has swung forth and back between its cor- 
relative extremes. Often successive vibrations 
occur before the popular faith gravitates to the 
exact truth and rests there. Indeed, exact truth, 
rounded with astronomical precision, without an 
excrescence or a bulge anywhere, is never realized 
in popular thought on a subject vital to the world's 
progress. Approximations to the perfect crystal 
globe are all that our mental laboratory achieves. 

This vibratory phenomenon has been amply 
illustrated in the history of religious beliefs. For 
instance, to our logic, the unity of God seems 
inevitable. But the world did not make assured 
conquest of it till after the popular reason had 
swung loose and often between faith in gods innu- 
merable, and faith in no God at all. Hebrew faith, 
even with the aid of divine illumination and an- 
gelic auxiliaries and miraculous theophanies, did 
not rest in monotheism, till, after many oscilla- 

31 



32 My Study : and Other Us says. 

tions, it had been forced back from the ethnic 
mythologies by servitude under pagan despotism. 
Till then, its history is a succession of lapses and 
reforms and relapses and recoveries. It covers 
centuries with wrecks of faith and retributive 
catastrophes. 

The spiritual idea of Christ came to its maturity 
in a similar way. It did not get possession, even 
of the chosen twelve, until the crucifixion before 
their very eyes wrenched out of them the notion 
of an Oriental monarchy and a golden age. Mas- 
ters in Israel were ignorant of the first principles 
of a spiritual kingdom. They sought in the 
twilight to solve the doubts in which their minds 
swung back and forth, between the letter and the 
spirit of prophecy. It should seem that men are 
not competent to become the pioneers of a great 
spiritual idea, till they have themselves in some 
sort lived through the opposite error. We know 
nothing but our experience. 

Turning to the practical working of Christi- 
anity, we observe there the same phenomenon of 
oscillatory progress. Is salvation by the heart's 
faith, or by the vigil and the scourge ? The way 
to heaven hung suspended for ages, like Mahom- 
et's bridge in mid-air, between the antipodes of 
faith and works. The history of those centuries 
of twilight discloses a surging sea of mingled 
doubt and superstition, on which honest inquiry 
was " driven by the winds and tossed." Compara- 
tively few found anchorage in the truth. They 



Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs, 83 

were driven to its discovery by the monstrosities 
which burrowed in the monasteries of Europe, and 
flaunted their vileness in open day at Rome. John 
of Goch, John of Wesel, John Wessel, John Huss, 
John Wickliffe, — five of the saintly name, — rep- 
resent a goodly succession of men, wiio, together 
with fraternities of believers like " The Brethren 
of the Common Lot," were impelled into a truer 
faith and a purer life by the putrescence of false 
and unclean things around them. But half a cen- 
tury must elapse after the latest of the five before 
Luther could command the world's hearing. 

Suppose that the demoralization of the age had 
been but half so stupendous as it was. What 
would have been the sequel ? No Luther and no 
reform. Half-grown evils do not compel revolu- 
tions. They create, not Luthers, but such men as 
Erasmus. His principle respecting the degeneracy 
of the times was, " Evils which men can not remedy 
they must look at through their fingers." 

To compel the growth of thoroughbred reform- 
ers, error must have time to come to a head. It 
must ulcerate. In the divine economy, the detec- 
tive feature is never suspended. Evil must declare 
itself by acting out its character to the full before 
it dies. Hence came the revolting extreme of 
Tetzel's mission to Germany, so insolent to the 
common sense, and so offensive to the indignant 
conscience of men. A Christian missionary must 
become a " spiritual hawker," as Froude calls him, 
whose business was to sell " passports to the easi- 



84 My Study: and Other Essays. 

est places in purgatory." That created the new 
faith by enforced re-action. Without such detec- 
tion of wrong at its worst, Luther would not have 
risen to his full stature, and stood erect, a free 
man, when half-way down the steps of Pilate's 
staircase. He would have toiled on cringing 
knees to the bottom. He would have earned his 
thousand years of release from purgatory, and 
gone back to his cell at Erfurt, a shaven monk, to 
tell his beads, and patter Latin prayers to the end 
of his days. 

In some things the extreme begat an extreme. 
Luther and his compeers swung loose from some 
truths. An iconoclastic faith is rarely an eclectic 
and well-balanced faith. The destructive force is 
not commonly the rebuilding force. In the vision 
of St. John, the angels who were commissioned 
to devastate sea and land did that and nothing 
else. They bore in their hands nothing but the 
golden vials of the wrath of God. Moral revolu- 
tions tend to the same insulation of service. The 
men who pull down are not the men who build 
up, and with the evil some good is left in ruins. 
So it was with the work of the reformers: the 
destructive force was in the ascendant. 

Perhaps the most splendid illustration of the 
vibratory principle in modern Christian history is 
the recoil from monastic seclusion to the daring 
activity of Christian missions. It is doubtful 
whether this self-diffusive type of Christianity 
could have come into being when it did, but for 



Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 35 

the self-centered type which preceded it. The 
theory of the world's conversion is intrinsically one 
of the most startling of historic ideas. It is no 
wonder, that when Alexander Duff first broached 
the project of missions to India, before the rever- 
end Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, he was re- 
ceived by good and able men, even men of large 
foreseeing vision, with a pause of incredulous 
silence. It is no wonder, that, when a few humble 
students of theology from the hills of Berkshire 
begged of the General Association of Massachu- 
setts to send them on a mission somewhere to the 
heathen, the wisest men present shook their heads 
in doubt whether the public sentiment of the 
churches would bear so novel and hopeless an ad- 
venture. No wonder is it, that the classic mind 
of Edward Everett derided the enterprise in 
strains of silver eloquence. 

It was a wild idea. Is it not to this day the 
most original idea in history ? Some secret power 
must have projected it into human thought. What 
was that power ? It was the Spirit of God, using 
to his own purposes the inevitable recoil of regen- 
erate mind from the extreme of monastic individu- 
alism. The nature of things forbade that immense 
bodies of men, inspired by the power of an end- 
less life, should either stagnate or ferment in the 
faith of the cloister for ever. 

Relics of that faith filled Protestant Christendom 
in the form of an intense selfhood in religious life. 
The theory of salvation appeared to be, "Every 



36 My Study: and Other Essays. 

man for himself/' The electric elements of Chris- 
tian theology had no outlet in any large-hearted, 
Christ-like action proportioned to their expansive 
power. They were pent up in the cells of indi- 
vidual being. They were like a spiral spring 
coiled up and riveted. Believers were still breath- 
ing a cloistral atmosphere. They were hermits in 
their religious tastes. The chief business of their 
religion was self-examination. That duty was 
more frequently than any other one inculcated by 
the pulpit. Christians lived with finger ever on 
the spiritual pulse. Men and women of unusual 
devoutness, who now would be district mission- 
aries, then wrote diaries of their fluctuating 
moods. They wrote marvelous stories of their 
conflicts with the Devil. Meetings for religious 
conference were largely given to narratives of 
their " experience." 

It was not in the nature of things that that style 
of Christian living should be prolonged without 
variation beyond the time when the Christian mind 
found it out. Men must find out both the good 
and the evil of it. Good men must live it through 
till they learned it by heart. Then the re-action 
to something more self-forgetful and adventurous 
was inevitable. What form could that re-action 
take more natural than the magnificent develop- 
ment of Christian missions? A missionaiy map 
of the world was the new symbol of Christianity 
which was sure to come. The swing of the pen- 
dulum was to be reversed. 



Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 37 

It has become a commonplace, now, that ours 
is the age of missions. Philanthropic activity has 
reached a commanding altitude of success. The 
world no longer laughs at it. Silvern orators no 
longer entertain gentle and perfumed hearers with 
predictions of its failure. It has no occasion now 
to ask for the world's respect : it commands the 
world's admiration. But what is the sequence ? 

Is it not that signs are beginning to appear that 
this, too, must undergo revision ? Perils are loom- 
ing up on the not distant horizon, which are the 
natural product of an age of vigilant and inventive 
expansion. We are lapsing into an unthoughtful 
style of religious life. The meditative graces seem 
to be waning. Christian work takes precedence 
of Christian reflection. A man is estimated by 
what he gives rather than by what he is. Wealth 
is assuming an undue importance in the worth of 
individuals and of churches. Gold is morally, as 
well as by troy weight, a heavy metal. The out- 
look is ominous, when, in any large fraternity of 
believers, the leaders take their leadership by right 
of property rather than by right of mind. It is 
never so in heroic ages. Then the right to lead 
depends on the force of character, which creates 
the power to lead. We need to learn by heart Sir 
William Hamilton's aphorism, " There is nothing 
great in this world but man, and nothing great in 
man but mind." 

From such a condition of things, one peril often 
comes without premonition. It is a break, one or 



88 My Study: and Other Essays. 

many, in the solidity of that groundwork of belief 
which must always underlie permanent growth. 
Great action must be built on great thought. 
Breadth of expansion must be grounded in pro- 
found beliefs. Diffusive force must spring from 
concentrated character. A man can do only to 
the limit of what he is. Beyond that, all is make- 
shift. Are not these underground foundations 
loosening ? 

In other words, do not the signs of our times 
indicate that this busy, mercurial style of Christian 
activity needs to be weighted with more consoli- 
dated thinking? Central doctrines of our faith 
seem to be jostled out of place underneath. 
Though not sunk out of sight, they lie loose 
and inert. They can support none but a rickety 
superstructure. The structure we are building 
leans out of plumb, like the Tower of Pisa. It is 
not their fault, but their misfortune rather, that 
our laity, on whom we rely for leadership in Chris- 
tian enterprise, no longer hold the independent 
convictions which their fathers had, the fruit of 
their own theological reading and reflections. 
Said one of them at a juncture of affairs at which 
his official position called for an opinion of a doc- 
trine in theology, " The clergy must take care of 
that : I go with the majority." Did he not repre- 
sent the attitude of multitudes of intelligent and 
earnest laymen ? Yet, in the present drift of the 
age, what other attitude can they hold ? 

The problem is not of easy solution. Yet thi* 



Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 39 

attitude of dependent faith, in which a man stands 
erect only when wedged in a crowd, is fraught 
with immense peril. An inherited belief, flanked 
on all sides by the forces of stimulant and daring 
inquiry, invites doubt. The doctrinal beliefs of 
clergymen are always open to the suspicion of 
professional narrowness. Under such conditions 
the ancestral faith of laymen seems made for skep- 
ticism to sport with. Many minds thus situated 
are preparing, when temptation crowds hard, to 
doubt every thing but the theorems of Euclid. 
Errors floating in the atmosphere may captivate 
the most enterprising minds, and drift them no- 
body knows where, unless a more thoughtful piety 
is superadded to that of this philanthropic and 
grand, but hurried and distracting, missionary 



We all need the constructive and tonic influ- 
ences of solitude. So much solitude, so much 
character. We specially need a new infusion of 
theological thinking among the leaders of our laity. 
We need a class of laymen who will take time to 
think out for themselves the fundamentals of the 
faith they profess. Few they might be in num- 
bers, but an unconscious aristocracy in power over 
popular thought. Without some such auxiliaries 
to the clergy to steady the popular faith, and to 
act as conductors of electric thinking from the 
pulpit to the pew, we may by and by find our 
churches quaking in secret at phantoms of doubt, 
which they dare not speak of, and yet can not get 



40 My Study: and Other Ussays. 

rid of. This is the peril of a " missionary age M 
which is that and nothing more. Worst relapses 
follow most splendid advances. Best things are 
susceptible of most fatal perversions. Does not 
the pendulum now need the touch of an unseen 
hand ? 

But we need not quake nor croak with pessim- 
istic fears. The Tower of Pisa leans a long while 
without toppling over. While the Church remains 
in her formative age, the look of her condition will 
be that of transitionary movement. Much of her 
vitality will go to rectifying abuses, repressing 
inordinate tastes, and re-adjusting mistaken or 
exaggerated beliefs. Opinion will traverse wide 
spaces from extreme to extreme. The movement 
will often resemble the ponderous swing of the 
pendulum of an astronomical clock of huge dimen- 
sions. Her character will seem to consist of ten- 
dencies rather than of fixed qualities and consoli- 
dated principles. These tendencies will be variable, 
now to one extreme, then to its antipodes. The 
popular faith may never appear to repose securely 
at the one spot at which lies the exact and bal- 
anced truth. 

Yet, such a look of things should quicken the 
courage of thinking men. It is cheering to know 
that no extreme has the inheritance of longevity. 
Error does not belong to a long-lived species. It 
carries in its bosom a momentum towards decay. 
Its doom is to die in the process of the popular 
recoil to its opposite. Every transition from end 



Vibratory Progress in Religious Beliefs. 41 

to end may bring popular thought under a more 
potent magnetism from absolute truth. Truth, 
pure and simple, is the resultant of intemperate 
advances and indignant rebounds. Only by such 
oscillatory progress does the popular mind seem 
able to achieve final and complete mastery of great 
ideas. But, so sure as the pendulum is to find its 
point of rest, as sure is the collective belief in 
matters of great moment for ever to approximate 
the point of pure truth, without excess and with- 
out deficit. Grand advances towards this may be 
achieved by one generation. It needs only the 
leadership of devout thinkers, inspired of God, to 
be its pioneers. 



V. 

OSCILLATIONS OF FAITH IN FUTURE 
RETRIBUTION. 

The dynamic principle of the pendulum was 
applied in a former essay to illustrate certain 
phenomena in Christian history. It has a hopeful 
bearing upon the present drift of opinion respect- 
ing endless punishment. 

Candid believers will concede that the time has 
been when this doctrine was held in harsh and 
repellent outlines. It has put on the look of 
hideous malformations in nature. Its contorted 
features have sometimes alternated between the 
horrible and the grotesque. Biblical emblems of 
perdition have been interpreted to the letter. The 
fire, the lake, the brimstone, the worm, the smoke 
of torment, the physiological signs of speechless 
anguish, have been made to appear, not only as 
realities, but as visible and tangible realities. The 
doomed have been pictured in the full panoply of 
flesh and blood, with the nerve-centers alive to 
agony, plunged beneath waves of lambent flame. 
Dante paints one of the circles of the " Inferno " 
as the abode of men who are so inclosed in glow- 
ing fires, that, when they speak, it appears as if 

42 



Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 43 

the very flames were human tongues endowed 
with human voices. Our own Spenser represents 
Pilate submerged in the sea of fire, and lifting 
his wringing hands above the surface. The lit- 
eratures of many languages and centuries have 
thus treated the retributive symbols of the Scrip- 
tures. 

Our tastes do not refuse this license to poets, 
but when preachers indulge in the same dramatic 
liberty we rebel. Yet the literature of the re- 
tributive sentiment, aside from that of the pulpit, 
offers to the pulpit almost no other model than 
this of grossly materialized conceptions. It is not 
strange, therefore, that such discourse lives in the 
pulpit of our own day. Some passages in "Spur- 
geon's Sermons" contain this shocking and dis- 
gusting literalism. 

Practiced preachers well know that it is less 
difficult to preach severely after a fashion than to 
preach tenderly in a manly fashion. Painful im- 
pressions of any kind are a more facile theme for 
discourse than the winning and the graceful. The 
bees that dropped honey on the lips of Plato have 
not swarmed on the homesteads of many of us. 
Nor is the distinction limited to facility in speech : 
it appears in other arts as well. Why is it that 
of the visitors to the galleries of Italy, nine out of 
ten will pause longer before the " Dying Gladia- 
tor " than before the matchless Apollo ? Why do 
they remember longer the statue of " Laocoon " 
than that of the " Venus de Medici " ? Even the 



44 My Study: and Other Essays. 

dog Cerberus is recalled in after-years more vividly 
than the bust of Julius Caesar, 

Quite in the natural course of things, therefore, 
preachers have dwelt upon retributive truth dis- 
proportionately, as well as intemperately. Unedu- 
cated preachers have discoursed upon it savagely. 
Field-preachers have vociferated it with an im- 
passioned intensity, and with grotesque accompani- 
ments of style and elocution. The tempestuous 
successes of one season of evangelistic labor have 
sometimes required years of pastoral toil to undo 
them. He is a great man who can preach well on 
any thing, but of great preachers he is the great- 
est who can preach well on "the wrath of the 
Lamb." 

The fact deserves mention also, that Christian 
art has had a subtle but potent influence in infus- 
ing inhumanity into the animus of the pulpit. 
"The Last Judgment," by Michael Angelo, has 
impressed upon the imagination of the civilized 
world its marvelous expression of the physical con- 
tortions of retributive pain. Unconsciously the 
pulpit has transferred it to discourses on the same 
theme. The influence of other causes has been 
thus augmented in giving a tinge of materialism 
to the conception of penal justice. Men who have 
never seen the painting, have preached under an in- 
direct inspiration from it, and others like it. It is 
not fanciful to doubt whether the celebrated ser- 
mon by President Edwards, which so appalled his 
audience at Enfield, would have contained its fiery 



Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 45 

imagery if there had been no Michael Angelo, and 
no paintings of the last judgment. 

The drama also has exerted a more obvious in- 
fluence to the same effect. The preaching of puni- 
tive justice has been demoralized by the taste for 
stage-passion. The reflection of the metropolitan 
and the itinerant theaters of England is very per- 
ceptible ill the sermons of John Knox and Bishop 
Latimer. The retributive preaching of some of 
their inferior contemporaries received from that 
source an almost malign ferocity. Many things 
have thus conspired to emphasize the comminatory 
doctrines of our faith. They have often made the 
pulpit a throne of judgment. Fellow-sinners with 
their hearers have preached like avenging angels. 

If space would permit, it would be a deeply in- 
teresting study to note the influence of popular 
profaneness, in interpreting into the language of 
the pulpit the materialized uses of biblical symbols 
of retribution in their grossest and most repulsive 
form. Many hearers, by force of their own de- 
pravity, hear in the most innocent dialect of the 
pulpit the ideas in which they are accustomed to 
swear. Such hearers, and by unconscious sympa- 
thy other hearers, often see the retributive visions 
of the pulpit through this distorting lens of pro- 
faneness in popular speech. 

From such materialism in both the pulpit and 
the pew, however it was created, a re-action was 
sure to come. Never does the composite nature 
of the human mind assert its claims more impera- 



46 My Study: and Other Essays. 

tively than when it has been assailed, long and 
without rest, by motives of a somber cast, in which 
the chief element is fear. The tendency is to 
either an intemperate outbreak of religious furor, 
or an equally intemperate recoil. But for some 
such convulsive relief, the end would be an epi- 
demic of insanity. 

Such was often the incipient drift of things 
under the preaching of retribution which has been 
here described. In sporadic cases, under the 
preaching of Whitefield and Wesley, it produced 
hysteria and catalepsy. But the great bulk of 
the common mind never takes the way to the in- 
sane-asylum. On that mind, the effect was to 
generate an exasperated antipathy to retributive 
ideas. This co-operating with causes outside of 
the pulpit has wrought out an intemperate rebound 
to the opposite extreme. Now retributive truth 
in any form rouses defiance rather than fear. The 
pendulum has swung clear over to the opposite 
end of the arc. 

The signs of this re-action are patent. Mark 
the relaxation of public sentiment upon the whole 
circle of truths cognate with penal justice. What 
else is punishment now than the reform of the 
criminal? Who ever emphasizes its penal force 
as an expression of moral indignation? Penal 
justice among us is capricious in its judgments, 
and spasmodic in its execution. Thinking men 
are beginning to question whether any tribunal 
can be safely trusted with the power of pardon. 



Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 47 

The same decline is more obvious in popular 
notions of divine benevolence. In the biblical 
ideal, benevolence in God or man is an athletic 
virtue. It rules a moral universe with stout em- 
phasis on moral principles. Does this robust ele- 
ment live now in the popular notion of it ? Where ? 
Is it not so thoroughly eliminated, that retribution 
and benevolence have become antipathetic ideas ? 
They are things to be "reconciled" by adioit casu- 
istry. The one must be " vindicated " before ttte 
other can be trusted. The popular notion of the 
divine government, therefore, is an asthenic non- 
descript, which would subject any human admin- 
istration to contempt. It is love without rectitude, 
and law without penalties. Atheistic nihilism can 
go no farther. Such is the drift of the popular 
theology. It assumes that there can be no endless 
pains for endless guilt, because the love of God 
can not endure either. Scripture or no Scripture, 
this is claimed to be the intuition of the human 
mind, and its decree is final. 

Is not the pulpit also sliding down the slope of 
the popular tastes in this thing ? It becomes me 
to inquire rather than to judge. Are not many 
preachers preaching upon the benign aspects of 
God's character, disproportionately and effemi- 
nately ? Does not an ominous silence reign upon 
the sanctions of God's law ? Some months ago a 
comminatory sermon appeared in " The Congrega- 
tionalist" from the pen of Rev. Dr. Channing. 
Did not its stern fidelity strike even its orthodox 



48 My Study: and Other Essays. 

readers with surprise ? Is not that style of preach- 
ing obsolescent in many representative pulpits ? 

Now and then an exceptional evidence of moral 
relaxation startles us. Mormonism astounds the 
nation and the age by the shock it gives to 
the moral sense of the world. What, then, is the 
meaning of the suggestion from a Christian pulpit 
of well-known fame, that that hideous mass of 
putrescent depravity must be handled with silken 
gloves, lest the suppression of crime by penal 
severity should make somebody unhappy? Has 
it come to this, that a defiant hierarchy of brothels 
must be welcomed to the fraternity of Christian 
States, trusting to the amorous cooing of politi- 
cians and preachers, to win the "erring sisters" 
back to virtue ? 

We seem to have fallen under the reign of tur- 
tle-doves. The time of the singing of birds has 
come. The atmosphere grows heavy with volup- 
tuous perfumes. Is this a sporadic case of eccen- 
tric morals? or is it a straw which shows that a 
tainted and pestilent wind is blowing over the 
land? The most threatening factor in the Mor- 
mon problem is the effeminacy of public sentiment 
among our own people respecting the retributive 
repression of crime. We coddle it when we ought 
to crush it. Thomas Carlyle was an extremist, 
but he said some very necessary truths to a mor- 
ally hysteric generation. 

What, then, should be the policy of the pulpit ? 
Shall we concede that the ancient faith is mori- 



Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 49 

bund, and adjust ourselves as best we can to its 
doom ? Not yet ! Not quite yet ! This faith has 
a great history. Its archives are full of great con- 
quests. Let us possess our souls in patience, and 
expect another swing of the pendulum : it is sure 
to come. The thing which has been will be, as 
surely as gravitation will bring back the evening 
and the morning stars. 

When Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher was arraigned 
for heresy by the Synod of Cincinnati, one of the 
charges in the indictment was, that he had ignored 
in his preaching the ancient doctrine of divine 
sovereignty. He defended his pulpit by saying 
substantially this : " When I was ordained, I found 
that the doctrine of God's sovereignty had been 
overworked. It had been preached so exclusively, 
and in such extremes of statement, that the cor- 
relative doctrine of human responsibility had got 
knocked out from under; and I thought it my 
duty to put it back into its place. This has been 
the gist of my heresy." 

The venerable father spoke good theology and 
good sense. So in these times of partial decadence, 
we need to study the popular affinities in respect 
to those things in which the balance of truth is 
disturbed. Then, the pulpit should throw its 
heaviest weights into the scale which is in danger 
of kicking the beam. If a central biblical truth 
like this of endless punishment has "got knocked 
out from under," the first business of the pulpit 
should be to " put it back." 



50 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Let, then, the bland and winning aspects of the 
gospel be presented in more even balance with 
the sterner truths which lie over against them. 
Discourse more frequently on the unutterable 
guilt of sin. Uncover the sunless abysses into 
which sin gravitates by its own weight of evil. 
Supplant the sensuous by the spiritual conception 
of the " second death." Emphasize the identity of 
guilt and damnation in the ultimate experience of 
sin. Be as wise as Milton's Satan in the discovery 
that, conscious guilt is hell. Declare the reality 
and perpetuity of the world of despair, and the 
appalling doom of consignment to a demonized 
society. Teach the necessity of that doom to 
matured guilt, because of its demonized character 
and its own supreme choice of supreme evil. Let 
these truths be re-enforced by discourses upon the 
ineffable holiness of God, the intensity of His in- 
dignation towards wrong, the intrinsic excellence 
and serene beauty of the retributive sentiment in 
the divine mind. 

These and cognate principles should be, for a 
time, the emphasized message of the pulpit. Let 
it be intensified by a refined and wary fidelity in 
the use of the biblical emblems of perdition. 
With what Milton calls " heartstruck " convic- 
tions, revive the use of the words which the lips 
of our Lord have hallowed for all time. Keep 
them clear of unscriptural elaborations. Reveal 
the weight of spiritual significance which they 
carry. Preach them tenderly. Preach them as a 



Oscillations of Faith in Future Retribution. 51 

fellow-sinner with the most guilty of the lost. 
But preach them so that they shall seem to mean 
something. 

Why should we take from unbelievers the horo- 
scope of our faith ? Why accept their too-willing 
augury that it is moribund ? We are of an ancient 
and lofty lineage. We have our own traditions. 
Let us honor them. If this doctrine of our sacred 
books is doomed, the whole system of which it is 
a fragment is doomed. The concession is a case of 
dynamite stowed under the fort we are defending. 

I have seen the statement, that, in the manu- 
facture of porcelain, there is a process by which a 
globular ball may be constructed of such exquisite 
delicacy of material, and with such refinement of 
art, that, if so much as a scratch be inflicted on its 
surface, the whole flies into a thousand atoms. 
Similar is the structure of God's moral govern- 
ment. All through it, from center to circumfer- 
ence, He has wrought His own infinite sensibility 
to the antagonism between right and wrong. To 
His thought, nothing else in the universe is so in- 
effably sacred. If He permits one iota of it to be 
dishonored, the whole falls into moral chaos. 

Therefore we claim that this doctrine of a retri- 
bution, commensurate with guilt in degree and in 
duration, can not die out of human faith. It is one 
of those truths which Wordsworth calls " truths 
that wake to perish never." Though it is the doc- 
trine of the Book, yet we do not depend for it on 
the Book alone. We depend on the nature of the 



52 My Study: and Other Essays. 

mind of God for its groundwork ; on the moral 
forces of the universe for its auxiliaries ; on every 
prophetic menace of a human conscience for its 
confirmation ; on the moral sense of every new- 
born child for proof that it will come direct and 
fresh from God, to the end of time ; and on the 
analogies of human law for assurance that moral 
government can exist nowhere without its majestic 
and imperative working. The religious beliefs of 
mankind never can break loose from such under- 
ground anchorage, in the nature of things. That 
is a very sure thing in the destiny of one world, 
which has the moral gravitation of all worlds 
flanking it on every side to hold it in position. A 
moribund theology ! Is the north star moribund ? 



VL 

RETRIBUTION IN ITS BIBLICAL ATMOSPHERE. 

The thought has become a familiar one, that 
every man has an atmosphere which he carries with 
him, as the earth's globe carries its ambient ether. 
Through this inaudible and invisible envelope, a 
man makes his individuality felt. It goes out to 
the cognizance of other men without words of his. 
A bad man bears about him a tainted atmosphere, 
the odor of which reveals his secret vileness. His 
words may be lies, yet no one is deceived. They 
come back to him, as dreams are said to do, in con- 
traries. An ancient legend tells of a false echo, 
which contradicted every voice that broke the 
stillness of the valley. So does a bad man's 
atmosphere belie his soft, wily speech. 

So a good man has an atmosphere of integrity. 
It telegraphs his secret life when he knows not of 
it. It publishes to all observers his unconscious 
virtues. It has been said that all true biography 
is autobiography. It is only what a man tells of 
himself that comes to be known and believed. To 
this should be added, that the most truthful of all 
autobiography is that which a man tells of himself 
unconsciously. A silent chronicler is always at 

53 



54 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the shoulder of a good man to record his involun- 
tary graces. At the final judgment good men ap- 
pear as good Samaritans unawares. " When saw 
we Thee in prison, and came unto Thee?" In 
like manner, a man of abounding force, good or 
bad, carries an atmosphere weighted with power. 
Wherever he is, the atmosphere is surcharged with 
electricity. When he moves, men feel his move- 
ment as they do the wind of a cannon-ball. 
Colossal men do not know their own size. 

Similar to this psychological phenomenon is a 
certain accompaniment which we may aptly term 
their atmosphere, which we find enveloping great 
central truths as they appear in the Scriptures. 
Many things enter into its composition, but chiefly 
the character of the man who proclaims a truth, 
and the spirit with which it seems to impregnate 
his own mind. Often the man is the message 
more than his words. His quickened sensibilities 
are the revelation. What he is, discloses the mean- 
ing of what he says. The interpretation of his 
words which is most consonant with the animus of 
the man, is most probably the true one. Even his 
silences often put life into his utterances. What 
he does not say has capital significance. The 
Word of God gives out no false echo. 

1. It is instructive, therefore, as a help to our 
conception of the idea of retribution, to observe 
how it looks through its biblical atmosphere. And 
in the first place, what is the look of it as it 
appears in the historic records of the Old Testa- 
ment? 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 55 

The first thing that strikes the reader as signifi- 
cant, is that the principle of retributive justice is 
made to pervade the whole history by means of 
signal and appalling examples. It is acted rather 
than defined, painted rather than said. So far as 
the character of the divine government is there 
disclosed, the impression is made with ineffaceable 
distinctness, that sin and suffering are inseparable. 
Law in the natural world is more uniform, but not 
a whit more distinct in the infliction of pain on the 
transgressor than the law of the moral world is, as 
represented in certain phenomenal events which 
mark epochs in biblical history. These occur with 
sufficient frequency to act as memorials of God as 
a righteous governor who will by no means clear 
the guilty. The moral impression to this effect is 
even more vivid for their occasional occurrence. 
They seem to emanate from the secret reserves of 
a force whose limitations no man can define, and 
whose disclosures no man can foresee. God comes 
out for the moment from the seclusion in which 
commonly His power hides itself, and strikes a 
blow, the echo of which reverberates through ages. 
Nations quake at the sound. It lives for ever in 
the world's memory. 

When we come to note the animus of the writer 
who puts the facts on record, we observe further, 
that he tells the story with the most absolute 
equanimity. Although his mission is to declare 
that " it shall come to pass that the ears of every 
one that heareth shall tingle," yet he is not shocked 



56 My Study: and Other Essays. 

or offended by the severity of the inflictions. He 
does not stand aghast at penal suffering as an 
unnatural phenomenon. He sees nothing in it in- 
human or malevolent. He does not treat it as an 
interpolation which disturbs the moral equipoise 
of events, by introducing a strange element which 
needs to be explained. Not a syllable is recorded 
in apology for it, or in defense of God's govern- 
ment. Nothing in the bearing of the historian 
suggests that the facts need explanation or apol- 
ogy. Penalty under given conditions is treated as 
the most natural thing to happen. The probabili- 
ties of history demand it. Nothing else fits into 
the becoming sequence of events. The absence of 
it would be a vacuum of mystery to be explained. 
Not suffering, but sin, is the inexplicable phenome- 
non. The lapse of man into its bottomless abysses 
is the appalling tragedy. 

We note especially four great catastrophic illus- 
trations of the retributive element in the divine 
government which made profound impression on 
Hebrew character. They are the Noachian Del- 
uge, the volcanic destruction of the " Cities of the 
Plain," the miraculous burial of the Egyptian 
army in the Red Sea, and the extermination of 
the aboriginal tribes of Canaan. These facts we 
find recorded with the calm dignity of history. 
They are embedded in the national annals of the 
Hebrews as symbols of the character of the God 
they worshiped. They stand in their sacred 
writings as memorials of the faith of their fathers, 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 57 

which they in turn are to teach to their children. 
Not so much as a mark of interrogation appears in 
question of their rectitude ; not a syllable in vin- 
dication of divine benevolence. The writer never 
has the bearing of a defendant or an apologist. 
He records the astounding tragedies with no more 
defensive comment than he gives to the story of 
Moses in the bulrushes, or that of Joseph in the 
well at Shechem. Children reading the volume 
consecutively are sensible of no shuddering or 
recoil on the part of the writer in its retributive 
pages. 

The tragic narratives are intrinsically natural. 
That a world wallowing in the filth of moral 
putridity should be indignantly buried from the 
offended eye of the universe by avenging waters ; 
that cities steeped in vices to which language could 
give no other name than theirs should be swept off 
the face of the earth by a storm of fire ; that Na- 
ture herself should suspend the operation of her 
laws, that the oppressor of God's people, the rep- 
resentative of a tyranny of four hundred years, 
might be ingulfed in the sea ; that idolatrous races 
whose stock was already caving in, in their corrup- 
tion, should be crowded to their doom to make 
way for more virile blood and a nascent theocracy, 
— all these things occur in the inevitable course 
of nature, and as such they are recorded. They 
are monumental tokens of God's righteousness. 
The doomed ones were monuments of guilt : they 
must be made monuments of retribution. As such 



58 My Study: and Other Essays. 

they must go into the world's history, and abide 
there for ever. This is the story and the whole 
of it. 

When a traveler wanders over the excavated 
ruins of Pompeii, and notes the evidences of the 
moral corruption of the generation entombed there, 
he feels that it was well to bury such a depraved 
civilization from the sight of men. Science may 
say what it will of nature's law in the catastrophe. 
He reads there a profounder statute than any of 
nature's teaching. It declares eternal justice in 
the ruin around him. Something in his own being 
responds to it as a decree of God. He tells the 
story to his children without misgiving. He knows 
that to the moral sense of childhood it will speak 
for itself. It needs no apology or defense. He 
says, "Here men offended a holy God by their 
putrid vices, and here He laid His iron hand upon 
them in retribution." 

So it is that the Hebrew historian records the 
retributive catastrophes of the ancient world. He 
declares them with the same equipoise of feeling 
with which he pictures in backward prophecy the 
six days of creation. To these as to those he 
might fitly have appended the finale, " And God 
saw that it was good ! " It is left to later times to 
raise tangled questions in the ethics of the story, 
and to pile up volumes of apologetic criticism. 
Not a word of this seems to have occurred to the 
contemporaries looking on, or to the annalist re- 
hearsing the tragic history. The ancient wisdom 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 59 

saw no mystery which needed solution. For the 
ancient ethics it was enough that retribution was 
visited on guilt. Why should it not be so ? What 
else could be in its place ? Penal justice was right: 
right was ultimate. Hebrew philosophy held her 
peace. The author of Ecclesiastes indulges in a 
great deal of skeptical comment on the vicissitudes 
of human life, but has not one word to say in 
doubt of the rectitude of these monumental records 
of God's justice in the sacred books of his coun- 
trymen. Those he seems to have accepted in 
believing silence. He saw nothing in them to 
swell the volume of skeptical inquiry. Such was 
the silent verdict of Hebrew philosophy. 

But Hebrew piety was not content with acquies- 
cent silence. It gave to the retributive decrees 
an approval vocal with praise. Prophets foresaw 
them with complacency. The people exulted in 
them at their national festivals. The popular 
songs rehearsed them in the temple-worship. In- 
spired poets poured forth imprecatory hymns 
without stint, and the people chanted them with 
accompaniment of lyre and dance. God's enemies 
were their enemies. They appeased their own 
retributive instincts in celebrating the retributive 
achievements of Jehovah. 

Such is the atmosphere in which the idea of 
retribution appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. Not 
that we find there no other than retributive memo- 
rials of God. They are full of foretokens of His 
redeeming purposes. Retributive records form but 



60 My Study: and Other Essays. 

a fragment of the whole. But alternating now 
and then with promises and blessing, appear these 
terrific disclosures and mementos of avenging law. 
Through the lunar radiance of redemptive grace 
runs this line of lurid red. 

There can be no question how the ancient faith 
received the record as a whole. Devout men made 
no election of part above part. They rejoiced in 
the story of punitive justice as cordially as in 
that of Messianic promise. They sang the one 
hundred and ninth Psalm, heaping imprecations 
upen the enemies of Judah, as heartily as the 
twenty-fourth, opening the gates to the King of 
Glory. The man of Hebrew lineage who should 
have looked on the lyric poetry of his people with 
repugnance because of its imprecatory songs, would 
have been false to his ancestral blood. 

2. Pass on now to the personal teachings of our 
Lord. What is the look of the retributive senti- 
ment as it appears there ? We are now in a new 
world. Another hour has struck : it is the me- 
ridian hour. The world's thought is at its best. 
Preparatory ages have brought all nations to an 
epoch of transcendent progress. New ideas are 
dawning. New institutions are struggling to the 
birth. NeAV truths are ripening in minds which 
are one day to sway the advanced thinking of the 
world. We might plausibly ask, in the way of 
hypothesis, is not the retributive feature of the 
divine government among the old things which 
have passed away? Is it not a fragment of the 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 61 

theological debris which the world has outlived ? 
Shall we not look for it in the gulf of revolution 
which separates the modern from the ancient faith? 
We look back on dismantled cities, and disinte- 
grated empires, and enslaved nations, and exter- 
minated tribes, and dead races, and a depopulated 
world; and we might plausibly ask, Is not that 
scroll of history rolled up, and deposited in anti- 
quarian libraries, for ever ? Is it not time for the 
ingenious benevolence of God to express itself in 
the invention of some more amiable policy of ad- 
ministration than that by which retributive justice 
has held the rod of iron over the past ? May not 
an awe-struck and trembling world hope for this ? 
Almost the first page of our Lord's discourses 
gives the answer. We find no such innovation 
borne on the atmosphere of the new world. We 
do indeed find new disclosures of the benevolence 
of God. We discover an innovation of redemp- 
tive wisdom which lights up and interprets all the 
past. But it is not such as to do away with the 
old elemental idea of retribution upon incorrigible 
guilt. On the contrary, because of it that idea is 
re-enforced and intensified. The furnace is heated 
seven times more than it was wont to be heated. 
A design is obvious to forestall and forbid the 
abrogation of retributive decree in deference to 
the birth of Christian liberty. The very frontis- 
piece of our Lord's instructions is, " I am not 
come to destroy the Law." His words emphasize 
the declaration. 



62 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Heretofore retributive threatenings have dealt 
chiefly with temporal pains. Their outlook into 
eternity has been shadowy and uncertain. Now 
that immortality looms up in human destiny, the 
punishment of guilt rises and expands in lurid 
accompaniment. A world is discovered, in which 
undying guilt is hedged in and weighed down 
with undying woes. Literal utterance can not 
compass it. Therefore emblems the most appall- 
ing that human sense can realize to the imagina- 
tion are invented to paint it. A more intense 
thought of retribution than was ever conceived by 
comminatory prophet or avenging angel, is thrown 
out into the theology of the future. That is God's 
ultimate idea in His dealing with incorrigible guilt. 

In this climax of revelation on the subject, ret- 
ribution is localized: it receives the definiteness 
of place. Hell henceforth appears in the map of 
the universe. A world wrapped in billows of 
flame, and nauseous with the fumes of burning 
sulphur, becomes the symbol of retributive pain. 
It passes into the literatures of nations. Dante 
and Milton write poems upon it which men will not 
let die. Genius numbers and classifies its crowded 
population. It pervades the dominant religion of 
the world. It dwells as a thing real and familiar 
in the thoughts of e very-day life. The depravity 
of men makes its name a household word in the 
dialect of profane speech. Its murky atmosphere 
hangs over deathbeds. No nation or tribe of an- 
cient times possessed in their religion or their lit- 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 63 

erature so intense and fearful a conception of the 
final abode of guilt as we have in the Christian 
revelation of an eternal Hell. And the teaching 
which has wrought out this terrific reduplication 
of the retributive idea in human thinking, has come 
from the lips of One who was God's supreme im- 
personation of love ! 

Let us inquire further how does the great 
Teacher Himself seem to regard His message in 
the handling of it? What atmosphere does His 
language and His personality throw around it? 
Does He dilute or minimize it ? Does He give it 
a gloss of gentle words ? Does He conceal it be- 
neath hints and innuendoes. Does He apologize 
for it? Does He labor to vindicate it? Does He 
philosophize about its necessity ? Does He dilate 
upon its intrinsic excellence ? Does He even con- 
descend to prove it ? Does He attempt to refute 
objections, and forestall the cavils of coming ages, 
against it ? Does He betray by word or deed, or 
ingenuity of rhetorical art, the shadow of a cloud 
of doubt about it in His own mind, or of a sus- 
picion that it may need proof or vindication? 

Not a syllable of all this. Not a sign appears 
of any of those ingenious arts of speech by which 
men betray the consciousness of a weak cause or 
a doubtful dogma. He simply says the word 
which it is given Him to say. u As My Father 
hath taught Me, I speak these things." With the 
serenity of conscious Deity He pours out the fiery 
symbols of indignation against evil and of its 



64 My Study: and Other Essays. 

swift destruction, with no word of comment, or 
attempt to explain or qualify. He unrolls the 
scroll of Judgment on which is written in fire 
what He will do with the incorrigibly guilty, and 
leaves it there. Such is the atmosphere in which 
the teachings of our Lord envelop the idea of 
punitive justice, pure and simple. It is an atmos- 
phere of sovereignty. Other elements of His mes- 
sage reveal other aspects of His character. But 
this threat of retribution to incorrigible guilt is 
the forecast of a righteous sovereign, just that 
and nothing less. 

Our Lord's absolute unconsciousness of having in 
these terrific disclosures uttered any thing which 
a loyal conscience can recoil from, is sublime be- 
yond the reach of words. In no other message 
from His lips is the majesty of His Godhead more 
luminous than in this. 

3. Reserving for a separate essay, a review of 
the apostolic epistles, let us note the biblical as- 
pect of the retributive idea as it appears in the 
pictorial visions of St. John. 

We have here a glimpse which it is impossible 
to misunderstand of the retributive sentiment of 
Heaven. How, then, is the retributive element in 
God's administration regarded there? Two orders 
of intelligence, if no more, are there engaged in re- 
searches into the ways of God. If spiritual em- 
bodiment adds any thing to the conditions of 
human insight into divine mysteries, that improved 
vision is given to redeemed men there. If ages of 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 65 

sinless study of the great problems of the universe 
add any thing to the means of their solution, an- 
gelic minds possess that advantage there. If the 
intermingling of the efforts of different orders of 
mind to penetrate the deep things of God, helps 
to clarify and balance judgment in the result, 
the conditions existing there must realize this ad- 
vantage. It is not forbidden us to believe that all 
possible facilities for making ultimate and finished 
discoveries of truth must exist there. 

There, if anywhere, then, we should expect to 
find the element of penal justice in the divine gov- 
ernment outgrown. Are endless pains for endless 
guilt intrinsically antagonistic to the pure benevo- 
lence of God ? and is the moral universe destined 
to discover this ? Then, we should expect to find 
some hint of this in the advanced thinking of the 
redeemed. Does angelic foresight of God's ways 
detect the final expurgation of retributive devices 
from the divine government? Then, we should 
expect to receive some intimation of this in the 
scenic painting of angelic worship. 

There is a spot in the heavens where a star once 
shone which has gone out in darkness. Astrono- 
mers mark a vacancy on the chart of the stellar 
universe where it once glistened. So we might 
reasonably believe, that, if the world of despair is 
ever to be blotted out of the government of God, 
the telescopic prevision of archangels would surely 
discover in anticipation the vacancy which is one 
day to be made by its disappearance. Should we 



66 My Study: and Other Essays. 

not, then, look for at least some distant and cau- 
tious hint of so stupendous a phenomenon in this 
picture of their liturgic service ? What else could 
so profoundly move a devout universe to thanks- 
giving ? 

What do we find, in fact, in this revelation of 
St. John ? Not a word, not a hint, not a syllable, 
not a significant silence even, from which the most 
dexterous, even crafty, exegesis can extort any such 
idea. Angelic and redeemed minds are in sympa- 
thy on this subject. They take up the problem 
where earthly research leaves it. They adopt the 
same conclusions, and continue the same adora- 
tion of the divine mystery, which devout men 
have acknowledged here. The public sentiment of 
Heaven is all one way. Retributive justice is the 
theme of song. The surging multitudes before the 
throne exult in it. It is not tolerated there as an 
evil incidental to a weak government. It is not 
accepted as a temporary device necessitated by un- 
developed resources or inadequate power. It is 
not accepted as the anomaly of a mysterious inter- 
regnum in which the universe is left to the work- 
ing of merciless law. It is not held in reserve as 
a thing to be endured in awe-struck silence, or 
told in secret and in whispers. But as a thing 
intrinsically grand and excellent, it is proclaimed 
aloud. On account of it, incense is offered in ador- 
ation. The endless duration of it is no offense 
to holy sensibilities. That, too, is a joy for ever. 

And this condition of things is a matter of 



Retribution in its Biblical Atmosphere. 67 

course. Does the inspired seer explain it? Not 
by a word. Does lie reconcile it with the benevo- 
lence of God? Not by a syllable. Does he at- 
tempt to conceal divine agency in it, under cover 
of impersonal law? Not by a moment's silence. 
No argument is suggested in proof of it, no apol- 
ogy is offered for it, no hint is given that it is a 
weak spot in the divine economy which needs re- 
enforcement. Something there surely is in this 
retributive idea as it is there conceived, which 
speaks for itself to beings whose ear is attuned 
to the mysterious disclosure. Something in it 
proclaims its intrinsic excellence. Some radiance 
from its interior glory illumines the very heaven 
of heavens. The assembled hosts are a unit in 
its recognition. They lift up their voices as the 
sound of many waters. What is that something 
which so transforms and glorifies the punitive 
justice of Jehovah ? It can be but one thing : 
The retributive sentiment and the benevolent senti- 
ment in the mind of Grod are one. Justice and love 
in the ultimate analysis of moral ideas are the 
same. Love necessitates justice, and justice illus- 
trates love. Thus and there the inspired seer 
leaves it. 

Such is the atmosphere which the retributive 
idea carries with it from one end of the Scriptures 
to the other. In this review, one thing appears 
very certain. It is that our popular and inherited 
notion of the place which retribution holds in the 
divine government, and of the nature of the re- 



68 My Study: and Other Essays. 

tributive sentiment in holy minds, needs radical 
correctives to adjust it to the ideas which pervade 
the Word of God. Those ideas are repugnant to 
our modern tastes. One or the other must give 
way in a re-adjustment of the popular theology. 
We need the infusion of some element into our 
theological diathesis which shall tone up our faith 
in more profound likeness to that of patriarchs 
and apostles and our divine Lord. We need a 
change of temper like that which iron receives 
when it becomes steel. Some suggestions looking 
to such a re-adjustment are reserved for a subse- 
quent essay. 



VII. 
ST. PAUL ON RETRIBUTION. 

In the construction of the Scriptures, inspira- 
tion was wise, we may reverently say adroit, in 
the selection of its human instruments. Each 
was fitted to his mission. The man and the junc- 
ture in the progress of revelation which he repre- 
sented were correlative. At any epoch in the 
history of revelation, therefore, something may be 
learned of the forthcoming development of truth 
from the character of the man elected to execute 
it. What he was, will throw light on what he 
said. What intimations, then, did the election of 
St. Paul to inspired office give of the chapter 
which it was his mission to add to the accumulat- 
ing volume of revelation ? 

It is something to the purpose to observe in 
reply that he was a man of large farseeing and 
foreseeing vision. He was superlatively a man 
of progress. He had broken away from a vener- 
able faith. It had been sacred to him as the faith 
of an honored ancestry. A mind like his, alert 
with the spring of its transition from an old to 
a new theology, was prepared for any thing of 
the nature of an onward movement in religious 

69 



70 My Study : and Other Essays. 

thought. He could not be wedded to the old 
because it was old, nor antipathetic to the new 
because it was new. If a supplementary chapter 
of eschatology was about to open in the growth 
of revelation, he was the man above all others to 
receive it into his own faith, and to ingraft it on 
the faith of the infant church. 

Moreover, he was a man of profound sensibili- 
ties. He was not predisposed to ascetic teaching 
by the hardness of his own mental structure. His 
sympathetic nature was loyal to the humane side 
of truth. His mind was intellect and soul, blended 
in perhaps as healthy balance as is ever found in 
men of great force. Though an acute thinker, 
he was not a " thinking-machine," as President 
Edwards has been termed by his opponents. 
Though a predestinarian, and one who had the 
courage of his convictions, he was not a bigot, as 
predestinarians are often called, nor did he crowd 
his faith into a fatalistic theology, as predestina- 
rians often do. He originated the elements of a 
theology to which Mr. Froude ascribes the pro- 
foundest thinking, and the most forceful reforms 
of modern times. Yet he was not the man to 
sacrifice, even to such a theology, the instincts of 
a large-hearted humanity. 

Again, he had been elected to the supreme rank 
of inspired seers in extending the canon of revela- 
tion. He lived in a state of prophetic vision, he 
had looked upon the risen and ascended Christ, 
he had been caught up to the heaven of heavens. 



St. Paul on Retribution. 71 

In inspired trance lie had made discoveries which 
his human tongue could not utter. His eye had 
been struck sightless by the overwhelming glory 
of the Lord in person. The memory of those 
visions was the atmosphere of his life. If, there- 
fore, any new truth was on the eve of disclosure 
concerning the destiny of man and the eternal 
worlds, he was of all men the man to know it. 
He above all men was fitted to be its pioneer to 
the faith of the Church. Of all men living, the 
man to whom we should most naturally look for 
the discovery of an improved Christian theodicy, 
was St. Paul. 

Further, we find that he does initiate a new era 
in the history of Christian thought. He is a dis- 
coverer, not merely a teacher of the ancient faith. 
His conversion formed an epoch. He was inspired 
to herald advances, even upon the teachings of 
our Lord. On central doctrines of our faith, he 
gives us advanced ideas : they are the fulfillment 
of ancient promise. The immortality of the soul, 
the resurrection of the body, the Deity of Christ, 
the significance of the Atonement, the spiritual 
import of the Jewish ritual, the person and mis- 
sion of the Holy Ghost, are all taught by St. Paul, 
in more full and luminous disclosure than by any 
other inspired teacher. Truths upon which our 
Lord was reticent are taught by this elect apostle. 
Speaking in the dialect of modern controversy, St. 
Paul founded a new school of theological beliefs. 
Certain great ideas which form a compact and 



72 My Study: and Other Essays. 

welded system of faith, which has been the favor- 
ite of the more thoughtful minds in the Church 
for ages, we can not define more tersely than to 
call them the Pauline theology. 

Now, in view of these preliminaries, we claim, 
that, if anywhere in the Word of God we should 
look to find a new revelation of eschatology, it is 
in these elaborate and original epistles of this 
chief of apostles. Was the time ever to come, 
for example, when a new interpretation of our 
Lord's teachings should be given to the world by 
divine authority? Was any appendix to them to 
be evolved by subsequent inspiration ? Had they 
any occult significance which a later exegesis must 
read between the lines ? Was any recondite prin- 
ciple of interpretation, like that of Swedenborg, 
to be invented, which should extort from them a 
hidden sense, even a sense contradictory to their 
obvious reading? Did the full and exact truth 
require any re-adjustment of their perspective, to 
be discerned by the profounder insight, or more 
scholarly criticism, of a coming age? Did they 
need any eclipse of their intensity, any obscura- 
tion of their fiery symbols, to make them true to 
the ethical instincts of more enlightened times ? 

The response we make to all such conceivable 
hypotheses is, that, if so, we should reasonably 
look for such supplementary revelations to the 
writings of this chief apostle of progress and re- 
form. He was the man to know them, if they 
were true. He was the man to foresee them, if 



St. Paul on Retribution. 73 

they were approaching in the near or distant 
future. His was the mind to take them in, and 
appreciate them, if they were needful to round 
out the system of revealed truth. And he was 
the man of all men to launch them upon the faith 
of the Christian world. 

Yet again, the conditions of his apostleship 
were unique. He was a Jew. He had been one 
of the most rigid believers of the most rigid sect 
of the Jewish Church, yet he had become the 
supreme apostle to the Greek and Roman world. 
From one extreme he had swung over to the 
other. His mission now was to win to the new 
religion men whose prepossessions were intensely 
antagonistic to Jewish traditions. 

He had a delicate task before him, therefore, in 
his treatment of any thing for which Christianity 
was indebted to the Hebrew Scriptures. If they 
had transmitted to it a notion of retribution which 
was a relic of a semi-barbarous age, it would have 
been the part of wisdom to let it drop silently 
into oblivion. If that might not be, he had every 
inducement to moderate its severity, to strike off 
the edge of its appeal to enlightened consciences. 
Above all, he had good reason, if his apostolic lib- 
erty permitted it, to mitigate the intensity of the 
symbols of retribution set forth by the authority 
of One, who, to the classic Greek or Roman mind, 
was known only as the " crucified Jew." In some 
way the apostle would have relieved the mordant 
pungency of the truth, if he could have done so 



74 My Study: and Other Essays. 

with fidelity to the Spirit that was in him. " They 
of Caesar's household," some of them of refined 
culture and noble birth, would have heard from 
him a tranquil philosophic doctrine of retributive 
penalty which would have been re-actionary in its 
relation to that of the ancient Scriptures and of 
our Lord. 

We now look to discover signs of these varia- 
tions and improvements upon the earlier records. 
And what do we find ? Is there a sentence, word, 
or syllable indicative of a re-actionary movement 
of the apostle's mind ? We find the main drift of 
his teachings devoted to the truths needful for the 
organization of the infant church. His work is 
largely of the executive order : he builds founda- 
tions. The elemental doctrines of redemption are 
unfolded with a fullness and magnificence which 
make his writings a treasury of Christian thought 
through all time. Moreover, his instructions in 
the main are not comminatory : they are cheering 
and commendatory. Benedictions are thrown out 
in jets unexpectedly, showing that his mind is full 
of them. He enters joyously into the spirit of the 
new religion as a message of hope and gladness. 
Never is his discourse misanthropic or ascetic. 
His life is a soldier's march of conquest, and his 
anticipation of its close a song of triumph. And 
what his personal faith is, that also is the spirit of 
his ministry. 

But what of the world of eternal loss, to which 
Christ had but a few years before given such ap- 



St Paul on Retribution. 75 

palling vividness? What has this hopeful, pro- 
gressive, exultant, triumphant apostle to say of it ? 
We find that feature of our Saviour's teaching 
treated by St. Paul as men are wont to treat a 
truth which has reached its maturity, and is now 
full grown, and fixed beyond debate. He accepts 
it as serenely as our Lord delivered it. He adds 
nothing, abstracts nothing, changes nothing. He 
explains nothing, proves nothing, vindicates noth- 
ing. He handles it as a truth which has passed 
beyond the stage of apology or defense. It is 
embedded in the groundwork of his theology. 
He has now only to build upon it as a foundation, 
and to use it as a moral force in his practical 
instructions. It is he who says in the tone of 
assured faith, " Knowing the terrors of the Lord, 
we persuade men." 

How is it that other men are accustomed to 
treat principles or facts which have crystallized 
in a system of general belief or of social order? 
They treat them chiefly by casual allusion: they 
put them to use in practical affairs, not pausing to 
prove or to defend them. In our jurisprudence, 
for instance, the principles most firmly rooted in 
civilized government find no statement in statute- 
books. They exist unwritten, as common law: 
they are recognized as authorities by courts and 
juries. Men build empires and republics upon 
them without once putting them into written 
speech. So, in ordinary life, usages and prece- 
dents which have the prestige of the common 



76 My Study: and Other Essays. 

consent, we do not constantly re-affirm and vindi- 
cate. We take them for granted. We speak of 
them allusively. Our discourse about them is 
fragmentary. We use them as things which no- 
body assails, because nobody denies. Nobody asks 
for proof, because nobody doubts. 

Thus it is that St. Paul handles the retributive 
teachings of the elder Scriptures. He treats them 
mainly by allusion here and there. He assumes 
them, hints at them, gives a glimpse of them, and 
passes on. But never are they contradicted : never 
are they blinked or evaded. He does not ignore 
our Lord's most terrific symbol of them. He ap- 
plies them to the demands of his case in hand with 
the same calmness of assurance with which Christ 
proclaimed them. No more here than there do 
we find apology or argument or reserve of truth. 
Never by a word, or by silence, or by speech 
askance, is the idea suggested of any possible mis- 
understanding of those symbols. He says nothing 
to arouse a suspicion that they may not mean 
what they seem to mean. Still less is any hint 
given of their retraction or displacement by later 
revelations, or their obsolescence through unfitness 
to later ages. 

We find nothing, for example, in the apostle's 
theologic temper corresponding to that suspense 
of faith in which infirm believers search for some 
possible loophole of escape from the obvious mean- 
ing of our Lord's discourse. St. Paul is the syno- 
nym of courage. He is a man of positive ideas. 



St. Paul on Retribution. 77 

What he believes, he knows. His theology con- 
tains no half-truths. His words suggest no lurking 
doubts underneath. As on all other themes, so 
on this of retributive decrees, his deliverances are 
those of a believer who has no misgivings. The 
words, " know," " knowing," and their correlatives, 
are favorites in his vocabulary. More than one 
hundred times they occur, and generally in such 
connections that their force is intensive. So it is 
that positive men put their case, and so it is that 
this most positive of men puts the fact of retri- 
bution. "Knowing the terrors of the Lord," he 
says what it is given him to say. 

Theologians may be classified as the men who 
believe, and the men who know. St. Paul belonged 
pre-eminently to the latter class. In the Koran, 
it is said that the word "assuredly" sometimes 
stands in the original as a sentence by itself. 
Mahomet, like all predestinarians, was an assured 
thinker. He had no doubts: he believed in his 
religion when he alone believed it. This is the 
style of mind which St. Paul represented. The 
tone of unqualified assurance runs through all his 
teachings on the subject of retribution. 

We run the eye at random over the pages most 
dense with the Pauline theology, and we find in 
broadcast those allusive fragments of speech which 
form the boldest utterances of truth, because they 
are the words of a mind consolidated in its convic- 
tions, and at ease from doubts. We catch them in 
glimpses like these; viz., "The Lord Jesus re- 



78 My Study: and Other Essays. 

vealed in flaming fire." "Taking vengeance on 
them that know not God." " That all might be 
damned who believe not the truth." " Tribula- 
tion and anguish upon every soul that doeth evil." 
"Enemies of Christ whose end is destruction." 
" The wrath of God revealed from heaven." 
" Fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indig- 
nation." " A fearful thing to fall into the hands 
of the living God." " God is a consuming fire." 

Such is the method chiefly of the Pauline records 
in handling the fact of retribution. By allusion 
here, and by partial statement there, and undoubt- 
ing utterance everywhere, the apostle throws out 
retributive ideas as if they were a thing of course, 
and would carry their own authority. No more 
to him than to our Lord does it seem to occur that 
the appalling truth needs vindication, or that it 
will shock a loyal conscience. He uses it without 
reserve or cautious speech as a thing fixed and 
familiar in the beliefs of men. He uses it as men 
use the rainfalls and the tides. That men profess- 
ing to believe in the inspiration of St. Paul, should, 
in the face of these records, believe also that end- 
less retribution can not exist in the universe of 
God, or that it can not be inflicted for the sins 
of this life, is an astounding phenomenon in the 
history of religious faith. Even a doubt or a hypo- 
thetical belief on the subject by such a believer is 
a sign of an erratic mind. 

For the sake of the contrast, let us, for the 
moment, make the Pauline theology on this theme 



St Paul on Retribution. 79 

hypothetical. Let us contrive to relax the posi- 
tiveness of the Pauline style of discussion in the 
glimpses it gives of retributive penalties. Put 
into it hints of the doubts and the half-beliefs and 
the hypotheses of suspended faith by which modern 
theology is often enervated. How do such frag- 
mentary Scriptures as these read? viz., "If the 
Lord should be revealed in flaming fire." "Per- 
haps taking vengeance on them that know not 
God." " Peradventure that they might be damned 
who believe not." " Tribulation and anguish may 
come upon souls that do evil." " Enemies of 
Christ whose end possibly is destruction." "Ves- 
sels of wrath probably fitted for destruction." " If 
the wrath of God should be revealed from heaven." 
" JVIw knows but that God is a consuming fire ? " 
"We conjecture that fearful looking for of judg- 
ment may remain." " Suppose that it be a fearful 
thing to fall into the hands of God." " Suspecting 
the terrors of the Lord." 

Put an "if" before, and an "if" behind, and 
scatter "ifs" all through this Pauline theology, 
and how does it match what we know of the Paul- 
ine character ? Has it the sound of apostolic sua- 
sion? Has it the ring of inspired speech? Who 
would ever be moved by it to fear the wrath of an 
offended God ? Yet is it not a fair expression of 
the dubious and volatile faith with which many 
in our day are dallying with the stupendous veri- 
ties of biblical retribution ? Is it not the kind of 
inspired Scriptures required by that state of mind 



80 My Study: and Other Essays. 

in which men come to the Word of God prepos- 
sessed with the conviction that a retributive the- 
ology is not to be found there, must not be found 
there, because of the debilitated " ethical instincts " 
which can not bear a disclosure of the indignation 
of God against sin? 

Fragmentary allusion and practical assumption, 
however, are not all that the Pauline theology 
advances concerning retributive truth. We find 
two distinct affirmations which have great signifi- 
cance in the framework of the retributive senti- 
ment as it appears in apostolic thinking. 

One is the positive declaration that life in this 
world without a knowledge of Christ constitutes 
an adequate probation, — adequate for the purposes 
of a fixed destiny in eternity. In the first chapter 
of the Epistle to the Romans, the chief premise, 
without which the argument amounts to nothing, 
is the sufficiency of the light of nature to give 
to the heathen conscience a knowledge of God. 
Then, it must be sufficient, and the apostle assumes 
this, to give an equitable moral trial. The whole 
force of that magnificent reasoning is invalid, ex- 
cept on the assumption that men ignorant of the 
Christian faith have an equitable trial. In the 
dialect of the world, they have a u fair chance." 
Even under the moral obliquities of hereditary 
paganism, man, so long as the stars glisten, and 
the sun rises, and the rivers flow, has that above 
and around him which proves to him a living God. 

No example of pagan character could be a fairer 



St Paul on Retribution. 81 

test of the question than that which St. Paul had 
before him in the Roman civilization. If that ex- 
ample could not test it, none could. Yet he gives 
his verdict with no intimation of a doubt or an 
exception. Man without Christ can know God. 
The proof is ample. The force of it is patent to 
his every sense. If he refuses to know God, he is 
without excuse. If he is incorrigible in that re- 
fusal, his damnation is just. The indignation of 
God is righteously displayed in his destruction. 
The apostle puts it in no siken speech. "Is 
God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? God 
forbid!" 

If the Pauline idea of retributive decrees had 
been purposely so developed as to forestall the 
modern objection to their infliction on men who 
have not known and rejected Christ, it could not 
have achieved that purpose more explicitly or 
conclusively. That punishment can not be justly 
inflicted on sinners outside of a Christocentric 
system of probation, certainly never entered the 
mind of the author of the Epistle to the Romans. 

The other declaration, equally significant, is to 
the same purpose. It is that a knowledge of 
Christ aggravates the retributive experience of 
those who know and reject Him. That is to say, 
so far is it from being essential to the equity of 
moral trial that men must be put into the Chris- 
tian range of belief and opportunity, that the 
working of such privilege, if abused, is to augment 
both guilt and penalty already incurred. The 



82 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Epistle to the Hebrews, whoever was its author, 
may be fairly taken as a representative of the 
Pauline theology. Its argument turns in part on 
this pivot : " Of how much sorer punishment shall 
he be thought worthy who hath trodden under 
foot the Son of God ! " 

Although the apostle is not contrasting here the 
light of nature and the light of revelation, yet he 
distinctly recognizes the principle that probation 
is a matter of degrees. This, in its bearing on the 
subject in hand, can mean but one thing. Chris- 
tian birth and training do not create the probation 
to which man is subjected here. They intensify 
that probation. The rejection of the Christian 
offer of salvation does not create the doom of in- 
corrigible guilt, nor is it essential to the justice of 
that doom. It aggravates both the guilt and its 
penal consequences. 

Two distinct systems of moral trial are here 
going on. One is superinduced upon the other. 
The light of nature illumines the one : the light of 
revelation illumines the other. Each is complete 
in its way. Trial under either is perfect in its 
kind. Guilt under either is proportioned to its 
conditions. Punishment under either is graduated 
to guilt. Thus the Pauline conception of retribu- 
tive inflictions comes into exact line with the 
teachings of the elder Scriptures and with the 
disclosures of our Lord. Starting from different 
points of departure, they all converge to one result ; 
viz., that retribution commensurate with guilt in 



St Paul on Retribution. 83 

degree and in duration is a law of the moral uni- 
verse which the retributive sentiment in the mind 
of God requires. It is a law, therefore, to which 
minds loj^al to God take no exception, and ascribe 
no wrong. 



Till. 

CORRECTIVES OF THE POPULAR FAITH IN 
RETRIBUTION. 

PAET I. 

The biblical idea and the popular idea of retri- 
bution are wide apart. To assimilate the two, the 
popular idea needs certain corrective and tonic 
appliances, which, for the most part, are seldom 
thought of. 

1. One is a more distinct recognition of the 
infirmity under which the human mind labors in 
forming a judgment of the retributive element 
in the government of God. Conscience once un- 
balanced by the overweight of wrong, tends to an 
underestimate of the wrong. It inclines to dis- 
placency towards the whole working of moral 
government which condemns and punishes wrong. 
Conscience thus distorted is like the needle de- 
flected by a disturbing magnet. 

Such is the condition of the human mind in 
forming its ideas of retributive suffering. Man is 
not an impartial judge of God in this thing. We 
live under violated law. Our life is an interval 
of reprieve between sentence and execution. We 

84 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 85 

naturally feel repugnance to both, and to the law 
which demands them. Our instinct is to assume 
an attitude of glum resistance. This matures into 
defiance. We fling our concentrated and angered 
will against the will of God. The old couplet, — 

" No man e'er felt the halter draw, 
With good opinion of the law," 

expresses in homely phrase the natural mood of 
man towards comminatory decrees. We under- 
rate the evil of sin. We gloss it over with smooth 
vocabulary. We expurgate from our dialect the 
words most expressive of its enormity. We in- 
fold it in the contradictions of fatalistic philosophy. 
When nothing else will do, we laugh at it. A 
multitude of the facts and fancies on which the 
risible faculties of men disport themselves are vaga- 
ries of sin. Probably more than half of the moni- 
tions of awakened consciences are drowned in 
laughter. The laugh of guilt is as distinct from 
that of innocent amusement as that of insanity. 

We calumniate the divine government of sin. 
We call penalty vengeance, and law tyranny. We 
disguise transgression into a shadow of virtue. 
This is a world of men and women in masks. Lit- 
erature paints vice as force of character. Poetry 
makes heroes of vile men. When will the world 
decide upon Milton's Satan, whether to hate him, 
or to admire? In popular fiction, it is the dull 
men who pray : the geniuses drink hard and swear. 
Mother-wit is oftener profane than reverent. Phi- 



86 My Study: and Other Essays. 

losophy follows in the same track. It indulges in 
wire-drawn speculations upon the consistency of 
penal justice with benevolence, till the old, plain, 
homespun notion of guilt is " in wandering mazes 
lost." Milton hinted at a profound truth when he 
remanded such speculations to the world of Pan- 
demonium. In the ultimate issue, the whole idea 
of retributive inflictions becomes abhorrent to our 
silken tastes. "We jump to conclusions which de- 
throne God. Then what ? 

This deterioration of moral sense needs to be 
reversed. We need to go back to the beginning, 
and start anew, taking God's idea of retribution 
as our model. There is in every erect conscience 
an element of robustness which does not flinch at 
the spectacle of pain inflicted on wrong. Shak- 
speare has the opposite weakness in mind when he 
makes Hamlet, in self-reproach for not having 
avenged his father's murder, say, " I am pigeon- 
livered, and lack gall." We are all "pigeon-liv- 
ered" in our natural mood towards the penal 
consequences of sin. Guilt enervates our moral 
judgments. On no other subject of human thought 
do we need more profoundly the tonic of moral 
sympathy with God. 

2. Further, for truthful convictions on this sub- 
ject, we need a cordial recognition of the intrinsic 
excellence of the retributive sentiment in a right 
mind. This is the vital point of our departure 
from th$ divine ideal in this thing. We repel 
from us the retributive idea because we mask it in 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 87 

unrighteousness. We make wrong right, and right 
wrong ; evil good, and good evil. That which in 
the divine government is vindicative of right, we 
degrade into the vindictive. The fragment of a 
syllable may be the pivot on which our thought 
turns into hostility to one of the most amiable 
attributes of the divine character. That senti- 
ment which uplifts holy minds into adoring song 
in view of God's judgments, is the sense of the 
intrinsic excellence of retributive dealings with 
sin. 

What is sin in the last analysis? It is pure 
malignity. It ripens into malign passion towards 
God. This is the germ and the efflorescence and 
the fruitage of it. The retributive sentiment in 
all right minds is the opposite to this. It is noth- 
ing else than an instinctive antagonism to malign 
character. It is hatred of that which hates God. 
Its assumption is, that it is right to punish that 
which hates God, and that in the nature of things 
such punishment is a necessity. Like all other 
right things, righteous punishment is intrinsically 
good. Minds loyal to God approve it, delight in 
it, find in it a profound satisfaction to something 
within them which refuses to be at peace without 
it. Pure justice is pure benevolence. Justice 
and love are twin stars of a binary constellation, 
in which each revolves at the bidding of the other. 
This was the sentiment which inspired the impre- 
catory Psalms. This it is that inspires gratulatory 
song in heaven in view of God's retributive deal- 



88 My Study : and Other Essays. 

ing with guilt. To hate guilt, or to hate God, this 
is the alternative. To punish guilt, or to anni- 
hilate God, this is the dilemma. Sin matured 
brings these intense extremes into contrast and col- 
lision, and the loyalty of right minds in heaven 
or on earth does not waver in its choice. 

In certain conditions of things in this world, we 
all feel the excellence of retribution. Exigencies 
occur, in which, with the whole concentrated force 
of our being, we exult in retributive inflictions. 
Read Milton's sonnet on the slaughter in Pied- 
mont : — 

"Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold!" 

What is the meaning of the passionate appeals 
to Heaven, of which all free literatures are full, 
for the justice of an avenging Power to fall on 
tyrants ? Are they all delusions ? Are they inhu- 
man and malign ? If they are, the best poetry in 
history is a cheat. We must expurgate our li- 
braries, and commit their noblest treasures to the 
flames. What means that human instinct of all 
nations and ages, which voiced itself in Hebrew 
jurisprudence, " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by 
man shall his blood be shed " ? 

" For murder-stroke shall murder-stroke be paid." 

Come down to the tragedies of common life and 
recent history. When Jesse Pomeroy allured a 
little girl to a desolate spot, and there, while she 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 89 

begged for life and mother, mangled her hands 
and face with a shoemaker's knife in malign blood- 
thirst, and then murdered his victim to hide his 
crime, what said the public sentiment of Massa- 
chusetts? Did not something in us all — man, 
woman, and child — rise up, and demand the pun- 
ishment of the wretch ? We called him miscreant, 
brute, wild beast, fiend. No superlatives could 
exaggerate our indignation. The Sovereign State 
sprang to its feet to crush him. That on a dimin- 
utive scale was the retributive sentiment in right- 
eous outburst. 

When we read Motley's story of the Nether- 
lands, and image to ourselves the scene of men 
burning, women buried alive, and children tossed 
from bayonet to bayonet, for worshiping the God 
of their fathers, do we not refuse to be at peace 
till our indignation is in some way appeased ? The 
doctrine of a day of judgment becomes an exceed- 
ing comfort. "There are Scriptures written in- 
visibly on men's hearts which do not come out till 
they are enraged." They become legible only 
under the white-heat of moral wrath. 

When the sentiment of judicial anger is thus 
set aflame, we all understand the imprecatory 
Psalms. We are not squeamish in their interpre- 
tation, lest their severity might shock velvet tastes. 
We read them with eyes like steel. They say 
what we feel as nothing else does, and we under- 
stand why they are inserted in the Word of God. 
We thank God for the prophetic glimpse they 



90 My Study: and Other Essays. 

give us of a day of reckoning when things will 
be balanced. 

It is recorded of the Rev. John Ryland, an 
English dissenting clergyman, that on one occa- 
sion he listened to a recital of the horrors of the 
slave-trade. He was so overwhelmed by the story 
of the " middle passage," that he lost his self- 
control. He paced the floor in an almost frantic 
agony of indignation, and exclaimed, " O God ! 
preserve me. O God ! preserve me." At length 
the cultured reverence of years gave way : proba- 
bly the profane habits of his youth came back like 
a flood upon him. He broke out into a volley of 
imprecations upon the perpetrators of such out- 
rages upon God and man. Can we find it in our 
hearts to blame him ? 

This is the retributive sentiment. Do we not 
revere the man who feels it, more than the man 
whose frigid soul is void of it? Who feels respect 
for the paralytic sensibilities which condemn it? 
Grant that it is a perilous virtue : still it is a virtue. 
Under the restrictions of right conscience, it is a 
noble thing to feel and to obey. A late writer, in 
describing the person of Daniel Webster in mo- 
ments of oratorical passion, speaks of his " splendid 
wrath," in which "his eyes became lamps." Just 
that is the sense of retributive justice when it 
is set on fire by a great wrong. No government 
void of it is either great or wise or good. In the 
administration of a holy government, like that of 
God, it is pure benevolence — that, nothing less. 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 91 

He would be less than God if he did not feel it : 
we are less than men if we do not reverently sym- 
pathize with Him in it. Until we can do this, our 
whole conception and judgment of eternal retribu- 
tion inflicted on eternal guilt will be twisted awry. 
Our puny impulses of compassion for the guilty 
will set themselves against His grand, robust be- 
nevolence. We shall find ourselves resisting with 
maudlin tears that which the great Heart of the 
universe approves exultingly. 

3. Another corrective of our views of the retrib- 
utive element in the divine government is a more 
adequate conviction than that which commonly ex- 
ists of the freedom and sovereignty of the human 
will. Here, perhaps, is the point of supreme weak- 
ness in the moral convictions of men. It is made 
such by two prolific sources of evil. One is, that 
sin itself tends to enervate man's consciousness 
that he is free. The freedom is in him, sovereign 
and intact, under any accumulations of depravity : 
but the consciousness of it is debilitated ; and the 
evidence of the fact, therefore, from that source is 
impaired. Men read it awry, and sometimes back- 
ward or upside down, — in any way that shall 
confute conscience, or give it the lie. 

The other evil is, that we have inherited from 
the past an immense legacy of fatalistic philosophy. 
Pagan theology is the science of "the Fates." 
Heathen poetry celebrates resistless destiny. The 
tragedies of iEschylus recognize no superior divin- 
ity. Our English literature is pervaded with 



92 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the notion that sin is a constitutional disease. 
Guilt shares responsibility with ill-luck. As Lord 
Byron puts it, "Man is an unlucky rascal." 
Christian theology, all along the line of its his- 
tory, has had to contend with this inherited 
tyranny of fatalism. Our old historic creeds, 
which contain the best thought of Christian ages, 
bear scars significant of the conflict. Some of 
them jump the difficulty by flat contradictions. 
Slowly and with militant tread has the truth of 
the freedom of the will toiled up the highway 
of our modern faith. Not yet even has it laid off 
its coat of mail. 

Meanwhile, other central truths of our theology 
have been kept in practical abeyance by the want 
of an uncompromising conviction of the sover- 
eignty of the human will over belief, over conduct, 
over character, over every thing that makes a man, 
and therefore over destiny. One illustration of 
this is, that the moral glory of retribution has 
been, and is still, under an eclipse. We behold it 
through clouds and darkness. If sin is a predes- 
tined necessity, to punish it would be infinitely 
more criminal than the sin. If temptation rises 
above the level of will-power, and drowns it out, 
or even momentarily submerges it, so that the 
consciousness of its supremacy expires, sin, under 
such conditions, is no more sin. Penalty for crime 
in such circumstances is malevolent torture. Man 
thus caught in the toils of fate is no more a sinner, 
but a victim. Inherited depravity, if it could 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 93 

exist, would be only inherited misfortune. Inher- 
ited degeneracy does exist, and that is misfortune. 
Inherited depravity is quite another thing. The 
damnation of a soul for it would be an outrage 
upon the moral sense of the universe : it would 
exalt the sufferer to the rank of martyr. He 
would be the superior of his judge. Moral gov- 
ernment built on such acts of retribution would 
be the supreme of all tragedies. It would be the 
government of a malignant God. 

It must have been some such notion as this of 
man's lapsed estate, that led Carlyle to say in one 
of his cynical moods, " If hell must be dared, it 
must." Under the tyranny of such a faith, we 
must all say it in sheer resistance to despair. 
Faith in such a government of the world, admin- 
istered by an almighty Being, would be enough to 
make it a world of maniacs. No man ever real- 
ized its existence, and lived. John Foster, by a 
false theology at this point, was driven to falsify 
his faith at other points. As the bulging of an 
elastic ball at one spot compels compensatory in- 
dentation at another, so in the structure of a man's 
moral beliefs, excess here necessitates deficiency 
there. Fatality in guilt compels the denial of 
retribution. 

Our popular theology to-day is suffering im- 
mensely, yet to the believers unconsciously, from 
the causes here indicated. Men are making light 
of sin because they more than half believe that 
they can not help it. They are " unlucky rascals," 



94 My Study : and Other Essays. 

and their ill-luck has to bear the brunt of the ras- 
cality. Men who are standing on the confines of 
the world of woe, and are slowly ripening for its 
demonized society, are thinking very well of them- 
selves because false teaching, seconded by self-pity, 
has persuaded them that they are doing about as 
well as they can do. Man is frail ; it is human to 
err ; who is he that sinneth not ? Men are more 
sinned against than sinning ; sin is the heritage of 
an unbalanced brain ; the fathers have eaten sour 
grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ; 
certainty is the equivalent of necessity ; who ever 
acted the contrary ? Thus men reason when hard 
pressed by an accusing conscience. In certain 
moral exigencies we are all Mohammedans. " It 
is kismet — what can we do ? " Even our charity in 
judgment of others, we turn into self-justification 
in judging ourselves. 

Accordingly, penal justice, when we face it as 
a sure reality, loses its divine radiance ; and we 
think of it, not as justice inflicted on the guilty, 
but as misfortune heaped upon the weak. Half 
the human race, more or less, must have another 
probation because they are so unlucky in this. 
Another world must give compensation for their 
faring so hardly here. To our distempered vision, 
eternal pains inflicted upon such " miserable sin- 
ners " would be eternal despotism. Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right? 

There is a vast amount of this sophisticated rea- 
soning grumbling in the popular theology against 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 95 

the faith of our fathers. Good and able men, too, 
are drifting into sympathy with these vagaries 
through the force of amiable sensibilities. They 
are duped by a craving for an JEolian theology. 
They are unconscious of the fatal hurt they are 
doing to minds less intelligent, and consciences 
less pure, than theirs. 

As a partial corrective of all this, we need to 
tone up our faith in the absolute sovereignty of 
the human will. Never under any conceivable 
conditions is sin a misfortune only: the instant 
that it becomes that, it is no more sin. A just 
God never damned a soul for moral disease, and 
never will. He will as soon send a man to hell for 
a dislocated hip or an infirm memory. Will in man, 
within the range ordained for its free action, is as 
autocratic as will in God. To a being with such 
a lordly endowment, probationary existence any- 
where, so far as we know, is a fair trial. Around 
the universe he would carry his destiny with him. 
He has that in his possession which no power but 
his own can crush. Every human soul is a moral 
Gibraltar: its conquest is impossible but from 
within. God never touches it, or permits tempta- 
tion to touch it, in such manner as to paralyze its 
supremacy. " God will not suffer you to be 
tempted above that ye are able." When Satan 
was permitted to try the moral temper of Job, the 
Lord said, "He is in thine hand, but save his 
life." So in every instance of temptation, there 
is one thing which God holds in impregnable 



96 My Study: and Other Essays. 

reserve. Next to His own sovereignty, He prizes 
that of every being made in His own image. From 
the archangel to a new-born infant, He guards that 
jewel as the apple of his eye. If wrong were done 
to its integrity, the universe would be shattered 
into chaos. 

Guilt, therefore, is guilt. It is not misfortune ; 
it is not ill-luck ; it is not imbecility ; it is not dis- 
ease ; it is not want of moral balance ; it is not 
inherited depravity ; it is not fate ; it is guilt pure 
and simple. Any trial consistent with a man's 
moral freedom, so far as we know, is a fair trial. 
If a man has more than that, he has more than 
justice : it is grace. Up to the full extent of 
conscious wrong, a man is damnable. Fate is for 
idiots. The soul that sinneth, it shall die. This 
is justice. It is not justice with a reservation : it 
is justice full and absolute. Being just, it is glori- 
ous and divine : it partakes of God's infinite ma- 
jesty. It is one of those ultimate ideas, beyond or 
above which human thought can conceive of noth- 
ing more pure or more sublime. Yet this is the 
retributive element in God's government. If it is 
not right, nothing is right. If it is not a fit theme 
of exulting song, the universe does not contain 
such in all its history. 



IX. 

CORRECTIVES OF THE POPULAR FAITH IN 
RETRIBUTION. 

PAET II. 

It was observed in the preceding essay, that we 
need rectified conceptions of the sovereignty of 
the human will to create an adequate idea of 
the malign nature of sin. Whoever originated the 
saying, "It was worse than a crime: it was a 
blunder," betrayed the atomic notion of sin, which, 
for the most part, rules the popular morals. As if 
any thing could be worse than a crime except a 
blacker crime ! It was a pagan thought. Under 
its illusions, men find food for comedy in sin's va- 
garies. Profane men coin sneers and jokes out of 
the words which express it and its doom. Why is 
it, that, in certain strata of society, force of utter- 
ance is appreciated in no other forms ? Why is it, 
that, on the platform, nothing else is so sure to 
command the applause of a popular audience as 
an oath? The more irreverent it is, the more 
delectable. 

This is sometimes illustrated where we least 
expect it. On one occasion, Ralph Waldo Emer- 

97 



98 My Study: and Other Essays. 

son was lecturing in Boston ; and for a half-hour 
they found nothing in his refined speculations to 
respond to with those signs of approval which a 
popular assembly loves so well. At length he 
exploded one of his inimitable antitheses, of which 
the latter clause was, "Damn George Washington." 
That his audience understood, and they gave him 
their applause. It was not the name, it was not 
any very definite notion of the thing, it was noth- 
ing but the word ^yhich tickled their frivolous 
irreverence. If he had said, "Damn the North 
Pole," the effect would have been the same ; and 
if he had quoted the favorite anathema of sailors, 
it would probably have been doubled. 

Indeed, the popular sentiment goes to a greater 
extreme. There is a prepossession for wickedness 
in the world which makes it an essential element 
of a manly character. Alfieri said, "The crimes 
of Italy are proof of the superiority of the stock." 
We find a similar idea in Shakspeare : — 

" Best men are molded out of faults, 
And for the most become the better 
For being a little bad." 

The collateral evidences of human depravity are 
nowhere more glaring than in the arts of self- 
delusion by which we cover up from the vision 
of our own consciences the blackness of darkness 
and the weird, chaotic damnation involved in the 
very nature of this colossal evil which we call sin. 
Common life is yet immensely below the level 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 99 

of Scriptural thought in its average conceptions of 
this thing. 

Yet it deserves remark, that literature often 
gives the lie to this popular delusion. What is 
the literary idea of sin as represented in the best 
works of human genius? When genius would 
portray in fiction the interior working of a great 
crime in a human soul, it falls back approximately 
upon the biblical idea. It reproduces some resem- 
blance to the teaching of St. Paul. Witness the 
whole history of tragedy from Sophocles to Shak- 
speare. Shakspeare's Lady Macbeth suffers the 
biblical " wrath of God." In the modern romance, 
so far as imagination is successful in awakening the 
response of the human heart to its descriptions of 
crime, it works in the line of inspired thought. 
Genius paints guilt as carrying within itself the 
penal fires which inspiration represents God as 
inflicting. In one respect, indeed, the literary idea 
surpasses that of biblical inspiration. It is a mer- 
ciless idea. It leaves guilt in solitary helplessness 
to its self-wrought retributions. It knows no 
such thing as forgiveness; finds no place in the 
system for atonement; discovers no remedial or 
compensatory expedients. Once guilty, for ever 
guilty, and for ever doomed — this is the verdict 
of the literary instinct in its portraiture of guilt 
at its maturity. Look at Hawthorne's description 
of its working in the " Marble Faun." Nowhere 
in the Scriptures do you find a conception so 
merciless and maleficent. 



100 My Study: and Other Essays. 

In Hawthorne's theology, even the knowledge 
of another's crime imparts to an innocent looker- 
on some of the elements of inevitable doom. He 
says, " Every crime destroys more Edens than its 
own. While there is a single guilty being in the 
universe, each innocent one must be tortured by 
that guilt." Again, he paints " the chill and heavy 
misery which only the innocent can experience, 
though it possesses many of the characteristics 
that mark the sense of guilt." Again, describing 
the remorse of Hilda for the crime of Miriam, he 
tells of her " heart-sickness, her dismal certainty 
of the existence of evil, her awful loneliness in 
her secret knowledge of the crime." "It envel- 
oped her whithersoever she went." It created a 
" chill dungeon which kept her in its gray twilight, 
and fed her with its unwholesome air, fit only for 
a criminal to breathe and pine in. She could not 
escape it. In the effort to do so, she stumbled 
ever and again over this deadly idea of mortal 
guilt. Poor sufferer for another's sin ! " 

Such is guilt as genius paints it. Such are its 
appalling ravages when unrelieved by remedial 
devices. Link, now, with the biblical idea of retri- 
bution, Hawthorne's idea of incorrigible and hope- 
less sin, and where can you find in the Scriptures 
any symbol of an eternal hell which appears unna- 
tural or inhuman ? The two things germinate and 
grow together, like to like, with hideous affinity. 
They are in exact keeping. Each necessitates the 
other. No such suffering can exist without its 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 101 

antecedent guilt : no such guilt can exist without 
its compensatory suffering. This is the working, 
not alone of genius rioting in a fictitious world : it 
is the working of all deep and intense natures 
which have brought a Christian conscience to bear 
upon the awful problem of the existence of evil. 
Human nature everywhere, sitting in judgment 
upon it, pronounces it to be true. 

4. Yet another corrective which the popular 
notion of retribution needs, is a more profound 
recognition of the impracticable nature of sin 
under a government of moral freedom. 

In a moral being, the range of sin is bounded 
only by the range of faculty. Whatever he can be 
as a moral being in point of magnitude or versatile 
capacity, that he can be in the magnitude and ver- 
satility of guilt. All there is of him is free to 
sin. From this, it follows that one of the most 
profound problems of moral government, perhaps 
to Infinite Wisdom the most profound, is, " What 
to do with guilt?" If it were subject to govern- 
ment by mechanical forces, the problem might be 
soon solved. It might be crushed as by an earth- 
quake, or exploded like dynamite ; and, fearful as 
the ruin might be, that might be the end of it. It 
might go into history as a past, and by and by a 
forgotten, catastrophe. Human government might 
rid itself of crime by the extermination of crimi- 
nals the world over. The tramp of a million 
armed men has stamped out rebellion in a prov- 
ince, and it has been heard of no more. Substitute 



102 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the scaffold for the penitentiary, and the peniten- 
tiaries might be vacant in a month. Human rulers 
have sometimes approximated the policy of exter- 
mination in the sanguinary severity of their crimi- 
nal codes, and the savagery of the usages of war. 
But the moral sense of the world has protested ; 
and the more sensitive it has become to the sacred- 
ness of human^life, the more intricate has the 
problem grown, " What shall we do with crime ? " 
Take but a solitary case. Are not all humane 
governments at their wit's end in devising ade- 
quate restraints of the crime of wife-beating? It 
is assuming, in our days, the dignity of a triumph- 
ant and unmanageable outrage on civilization, 
which law can neither prevent nor adequately 
punish. What is the meaning of the blunt pro- 
posal here and there, to restore the old element of 
torture to the criminal code for the punishment 
of this crime? The nineteenth century looks 
back helplessly to the ninth. Is it not a confession 
that we do not know what else to do ? Crime is 
for ever taking on forms which balk the devices 
of corrective justice. Our boasted advances in 
science and invention redouble the resources of 
guilt to war on mankind. " Dynamite-fiends " set 
thrones tottering, and nations trembling ; and they 
laugh at law when it would lay hands upon them. 
There seems to be no end to this conflict of sin 
with social order. Humanity goes down in the 
struggle. Human nature cries out for vengeance, 
and wise men are dumb. 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 103 

The perplexity is not restricted to the control 
of gross and brutal crimes. It runs a tangled 
thread through the unwritten laws and amenities 
of social life. Why is it that a subtile law of eti- 
quette commands suppression of conversation on 
personal religion unless some hint has been given 
that it will not be unwelcome? It is because 
religious thought, the instant that it assumes a 
personal bearing, runs against a universal con- 
sciousness of wrong. Personal religion in every 
mind starts with the idea of sin.- Therefore it 
disturbs equipoise of feeling. Generally it is un- 
welcome. It is the key to a dark and secret history. 
Men are shy of it. They do not know what to 
do with it. Guilt is coiled up behind it ; and men 
do not know what to say of that, or what to do 
with it. Everywhere present in the lair of human 
consciousness is this untamed sense of wrong. 
Our human instinct is to bury it in silence, and we 
shut the mouths of others by not opening our own. 
We feel it only to fear it, and to suffer. Therefore 
we weave over and around it the peremptory ban 
of social etiquette, to bind it, and thrust it out of 
speech. What else can we do with it ? 

Still more complicated and unmanageable does 
the problem become when guilt threatens the 
very being of society. In the world as it is, guilt 
and brute force are in the ascendant; and they 
concentrate and fortify themselves against law. 
" Dangerous classes " threaten all that makes life 
desirable. The chief question of law is, How 



104 My Study: and Other Essays. 

shall wrong be kept under, and within the bounds 
necessary to social well-being? Everywhere it is 
a disturbing force. Men find no place for it in 
the constitution of things. It is war against 
nature. All that we can do with it, is to shut it 
out of sight, behind bolts and bars, in places of 
its own, and leave it there. 

Yes, after ages of study and experiment in crim- 
inal jurisprudence, human law has not advanced 
in its treatment of incorrigible sin beyond the 
dungeon and the scaffold. We are all born to 
the sight of jails and state prisons. We sleep in 
peace, only because we know that "dangerous 
classes " are locked up there behind armed senti- 
nels. If mobs set them loose, we tremble in our 
beds from nightfall till the morning. If prisons 
fail us, we take to revolvers ; and with those the 
desperado is our superior. What shall we do? 
So obdurate and impracticable a thing is guilt as 
an element in the social organism ! Time works 
no change : law grows no wiser. The government 
of incorrigible guilt has evolved the policy of 
retributive penalties, and there it stops. Neither 
justice nor benevolence can take a step beyond. 
In this respect, Law stands where it did when it 
laid the iron hand on the brow of the first murderer. 

Now, the conditions of the problem are not 
essentially different under the government of God. 
Incorrigible guilt there, moral freedom remaining 
intact, is the same impracticable thing as else- 
where. What shall a righteous sovereign do with 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 105 

it ? What can He do ? Exterminate it by sheer 
omnipotence H? can not. The million armed men 
might devastate a continent, and yet not stamp 
out one guilty thought. Sin, under the law of 
moral freedom, bears no relation to physical force. 
It is no irreverence to say that God can not put an 
end to it by sheer power. Can He make yesterday 
to-day? For the same reason, and in the same 
sense, He can not stop the ravages of sin by 
mechanical devices. He can not bury it by earth- 
quakes, nor crush it by cyclones. 

Hence it is, that God can not save a sinner if 
the sinner will not be saved. What shall He do ? 
Shall He forgive ? But, the guilty remaining un- 
repentant, that would be a farce. An unholy 
universe would laugh at universal amnesty, and 
the moral sense of holy beings would resent it as 
&n outrage upon law and grace. It could not add 
an iota to the happiness of any being, or relieve 
one pang of suffering. The great problem would 
remain unsolved, " What to do with guilt?" 

Under moral government, if guilt can not be 
quelled by means of moral suasion or its equiv- 
alents, nothing can reach it but retribution. 
Man's own will has the decision within itself: if 
he will not be saved, he can not be. Nothing is 
left but retributive devices for the protection of 
the innocent. And of these, the first and chief is 
to leave guilt to itself. Give it a place where it 
can be let alone to act out its own wretched na- 
ture. As human law has shut upon it the doors 



106 My Study: and Other Essays. 

of the penitentiary and the dungeon, so divine 
law has devised a place where guilt matured and 
incorrigible shall be shut in to its own malign sol- 
itude, and left there. But guilt thus left and 
turned back upon itself is hell. Call it what we 
may, disguise it as we please, it is the "second 
death." It is the world of weeping and wailing 
and gnashing of teeth. What else can it be? 
Who is to blame for it? Would God be worthy 
of trust if He did otherwise ? 

Let the last inquiry be answered by another. 
When Chief Justice Shaw, with tremulous voice 
and streaming eyes, pronounced sentence of death 
upon his friend, Professor Webster, for the murder 
of Dr. Parkman, did he do right, or wrong ? Did 
the deed deserve the reverence, or the execration, 
of mankind ? One or the other it did deserve, — 
which? That was an act of retributive justice. 
Either it was a deed of high and noble virtue, or 
it was murder. Which was it? So when God 
pronounces the sentence of eternal death upon 
eternal guilt, He does the thing that is right, and 
the only thing. It is just ; being just, it is worthy 
of God; being godlike, it is intrinsically excellent 
and amiable. It deserves, as it receives, the exult- 
ing approval of all holy minds. He does all that 
He can do with such obdurate infatuation under 
the conditions of moral freedom. 

It is futile to say that God's government is un- 
like man's. As it respects the principle in hand, 
it is not unlike man's. Both are founded on im- 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 107 

mutable right. The retributive element is the 
same in both. The only difference is, that in the 
divine administration retributive judgments are 
infinitely more equitable, retributive sanctions 
infinitely more imperative, and the execution of 
retributive decree is infinitely more exact in its 
adjustment to ill-desert. In the mind of God, be 
it repeated, pure justice is pure benevolence. We 
can not be in sympathy with God until we acknowl- 
edge this, and recognize His retributive inflictions 
with the same grateful reverence with which we 
adore His redeeming love. 

Moreover, it is due to the completeness of faith 
in this matter, that we recognize the personal 
agency of God in His retributive administration. 
It is true that penal justice comes about through 
the operation of general laws. The moral consti- 
tution of things provides for and necessitates it. 
The make of the human mind causes a transgressor 
to become at the maturity of his guilt his own 
executioner. He is self-tried, self-convicted, self- 
condemned, and self-damned. But in the whole 
process, from beginning to end, God executes His 
own decrees. He never abrogates His prerogative 
as the supreme Judge of sin. Whatever suffering 
sin creates, He inflicts. The same retributive sen- 
timent which we find in ourselves approving and 
demanding the punishment of guilt, exists in the 
mind of God, and there approves and demands the 
same. Here as elsewhere God acts through laws ; 
but they are laws of His own creation, and they 



108 My Study: and Other Essays. 

express the decree of His own will. We yield to 
a moral weakness which dishonors God, if we con- 
ceal from our own minds the retributive person- 
ality of God under cover of eternal laws. It is 
the same error which agnosticism commits when it 
hides the divine Person behind pantheistic devices. 
God, the supreme and living One, acts in the fiery 
judgments and remorseful inflictions of conscience, 
and in all the ramifications of moral government 
by which guilt is made to work out its own damna- 
tion. The popular theology in this respect needs 
reconstruction. The pulpit in this matter has a 
mission to this generation which it can not ignore 
without shame. 

The views here presented have a significant bear- 
ing on one form of objection to the doctrine of 
retribution which is, for the most part, passed over 
in silence by the pulpit. The objection assumes a 
personal character. We are told that a humane, 
and especially a cultured, mind can not believe the 
doctrine. It is too abhorrent to benign sensibili- 
ties. Our inmost souls are shocked and racked by 
the conception. Preachers are charged with an 
induration of humane sensibilities in proclaiming 
it. We are told that our souls are flint. We are 
even believed to be guilty of some intellectual 
legerdemain by which we preach what we do 
not at heart believe. We do not because we can 
not. We preach under stress of professional 
necessity. 

An English critic gives expression to this charge 



The Popular Faith in Retribution. 109 

in a review of the preaching of President Edwards 
in this style : " He disrobed himself of human sym- 
pathies. He resolved himself absolutely into a 
thinking apparatus. He deliberately looks into 
Hell, and the whole heat of its burnings can not 
melt into a tear the ice in his eye. He gazes on 
the greater portion of his brother-men stretched 
to eternity upon a wheel, and his eyelid quivers 
no more than if he saw a butterfly." 

To us who know the traditions of the gentle 
and quick sensibilities, even the poetic tempera- 
ment, of President Edwards, this passes by as the 
idle wind. Whatever else the illustrious author 
of the " Essay on the Will" may have been, he 
was not made of cast-iron. But the popular notion 
of him contains a notion of our faith in retribution 
which deserves an answer. And our answer is, 
that be it true, or not true, the biblical reception 
of God's retributive inflictions by holy minds 
exceeds it in apparent vindictiveness. The heav- 
enly temperament is more apathetic than ours. 
Are believers here malevolent? Then believers 
there are immensely more so. The redeemed mind 
not only does not quail before retributive disclo- 
sures, but exalts and magnifies them. The public 
sentiment of the holy universe indorses them with 
rejoicings as a sublime and benignant revelation 
of God. The distress which we feel in view of 
the appalling reality is silently rebuked by its con- 
trast with inspired and heavenly experiences. 

Which, then, is true? Which compasses the 



110 My Study: and Other Essays. 

ultimate discoveries of eternity, when our minds 
shall have grown old in study of the deep things 
of God, — our enervated, tremulous, paralytic 
faith, or the robust and exulting vision of St. 
John? 



X. 

RETRIBUTION IN THE LIGHT OF REASON. 

PART I. 

The foregoing discussions on the subject of 
Retribution have given rise to a considerable cor- 
respondence. One letter from a stranger to me, 
an intelligent and earnest unbeliever in the doc- 
trine of endless punishment, has called forth this 
reply. I am not at liberty to publish the letter of 
my correspondent ; but the answer is given here, 
though greatly enlarged, in the hope that it may 
suggest to other minds one way of putting the 
doctrine which is not open to the objections which 
are urged against it in other forms. 

Dear Sir, — I thank you for the frankness and 
courtesy of your letter. I recognize in it the 
thought of an earnest mind with which it is a 
pleasure to confer, whether we can agree, or not, 
in our ultimate beliefs. The most that I can hope 
to do in manuscript reply, is possibly to put the 
doctrine of retribution into a different form from 
that in which you have been accustomed to con- 
ceive of it, and to deny it. It is a subject on 

ill 



112 My Study: and Other Essays. 

which the vital question turns on the way we put 
things. If I succeed in making it clear that there 
is a way of putting it in which it is not open to 
the odium with which you now associate it, you 
will not think your time lost in reflecting upon 
the following suggestions ; viz., — 

1. The doctrine as I would state it in its sim- 
plest form is this : That endless sin must be pun- 
ished with endless misery. It is not that the sin 
of an hour or of one lifetime will be visited with 
eternal pains, except as it involves the sequence 
of eternal sin. God, in the administration of His 
government, adjusts results to actual conditions, 
not to conditions only possible or conceivable. 
He adjusts punishment to character as it is in the 
concrete, not to sin in the abstract. It is in one 
sense true, therefore, that man is punished for ever 
for the sins of this life, but only as the sins of 
this life create a character which will perpetuate 
sin for ever. We involve ourselves in hopeless 
confusion if we attempt to frame a conception of 
the divine government in the abstract, as related 
to character in the abstraet. God deals with 
things as they are. He deals with a sinful char- 
acter as a whole. Time and eternity are not sepa- 
rated in His decrees, and the one set over as a 
balance to the other. Both form one destiny. 
Sin is punished for what it is, and so long as it is. 
This is just. Both reason and revelation teach, 
that, so long as a man sins, so long he must suffer ; 
and this is the doctrine of endless punishment. 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 113 

Unending sin will involve unending suffering. 
Kevelation teaches that some men will sin for ever ; 
therefore they must suffer for ever. 

This to reason seems intrinsically right. Does 
it not? No moral instincts which are loyal to 
God revolt from it as an outrage. Why should 
they? More than this, endless pain to endless 
sin is inevitable in the nature of things. Sin and 
suffering are indissoluble evils. Where the one is, 
there the other must be. What the one is, that 
the other must be in intensity. As well think to 
separate pain from a lacerated nerve as from an 
outraged conscience. As well expect to pierce 
your eyeball with a lancet painlessly as to save 
from misery a moral being whose nature is once 
gangrened through and through with a sense of 
guilt. A guilty being has only to discover him- 
self as he is, to be overwhelmed with suffering for 
ever. That discovery is inevitable in eternity. 
There are no shams in a spiritual world. 

2. Sin is entirely a voluntary wrong. Here and 
everywhere, in its initial stages and in its maturity, 
it is the work of the sinner's own will. So far as 
it is not that, it is not sin. Temptation is not sin. 
Inherited bias to evil is not sin. God will not 
punish it any more than other misfortune. Man 
never inherits guilt. Man or demon in sin is there 
because he chooses to be there. In Hell as on 
earth, man will be a sinner because he will choose 
to be such. Sin is never inflicted as the punish- 
ment of sin. Devils are not in sin as a doom. 



114 My Study: and Other JEssays. 

They do not suffer it : they create it. It has not 
come upon them unawares : they have willed it so. 
This is an elemental truth, which, because we can 
pack it in a nutshell, we do not appreciate. It 
covers the moral universe with its corollaries. 
More than half of the mystery of evil is solved 
by it. 

3. Sin is of such a nature as to perpetuate itself. 
This is the law of all character. If left to itself, 
with no remedial influence from without, sin never 
dwindles into nothing. Crimes never shrink into 
foibles; passions never subside into subacute 
eccentricities ; vice never shrinks into infirmity. 
Once guilty, always guilty, is the law of all de- 
pravity, no external power intervening. Virtue 
is under the same law. It is the normal condition 
of character as such. Where the tree falls, there 
it shall lie, — not by fatality, but by the self-perpet- 
uating force of moral choice. Hence the intrinsic 
and appalling evil of sin. Hence the necessity 
of subjecting it to imperative control in a moral 
universe. 

4. Sin everywhere is under a law of growth. 
All character is under the same law. Guilt, there- 
fore, becomes more obdurate and intense with 
time. It is so here : we have reason to believe 
that it will be so in eternity. In a spiritual state 
of being, the self-delusions and disguises of sin are 
removed : then sin, by its innate law of growth, 
mounts up into matured, finished character. Im- 
pulsive sin settles into a consolidated principle of 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 115 

evil. Guilty desire swells into guilty passion. 
Evil slumbering below the depths of consciousness, 
is roused into sleepless vigilance. Sin thus ma- 
tured is pure malignity. It is character demon- 
ized. Hatred of God and of all good, is sin at its 
climax of evolution. We find only approaches to 
it here, but they are enough to disclose what sin 
must be when it is left to itself to act itself out 
without concealment or restraint. It is the most 
appalling factor in the destiny of a moral being. 

5. The misery consequent upon sin, which com- 
mon speech calls its punishment, is chiefly spirit- 
ual in its nature. We do see, indeed, that in this 
world sin creates bodily disorder, and therefore 
bodily pain. Guilt builds up a physical tyranny. 
Some crimes have a fruitage in characteristic 
diseases, which follow from no other cause. The 
bloated, discolored, mutilated body proclaims its 
bondage to an evil spirit. A similar law may hold 
sway over the spiritual body. The analogy of 
nature seems to suggest that. But the Scriptures 
do not affirm it; and I prefer, therefore, to say that 
the punishment of sin is chiefly spiritual. As the 
cause is of the spirit, so is its penal consequence, 
the body being but an incident to both. It is the 
misery of conscious guilt, of guilt passionate and 
obdurate, of guilt concentrated and malign, of 
guilt accumulating and without end ; of moral 
disorder through and through; of conscious an- 
tagonism to God and to all good ; of the recipro- 
cal antagonism of God, to whom guilt is abhorrent ; 



116 My Study: and Other Essays. 

of the chronic warfare which this mutual hostility 
between God and the guilty engenders ; of the 
self-contempt and self-loathing inseparable from 
the extreme of full-grown depravity; and of the 
intolerable moral solitude in which no second 
party can share either guilt or doom ; — the misery 
of this conscious experience, making up the whole 
being of the man, without alleviation by one right 
emotion or holy purpose or godlike thought, — this 
is the punishment of sin. This is the endless 
curse. 

In your letter, you put the case as that of a 
tender and guileless maiden in her " teens," guilty 
of foibles only, yet not a saint, and therefore 
"roasting" over slow and dancing flames, while 
God looks on as at an entertainment. I put it as 
the case of a demonized being, like Nero or the 
Borgias, or like Mrs. Stowe's " Legare " in " Uncle 
Tom's Cabin," grown up to the point of supreme 
depravity, suffering the rage of his own guilty 
passions, torturing himself by his own choice of 
evil as his supreme good, malign in his emotions, 
an enemy of God, while God has done all that 
infinite wisdom can do to save him. Is there no 
difference between the two pictures? Is there 
no distinction between a doom to evil under 
almighty tyranny, and the voluntary choice of 
moral suicide ? Are both equally open to the 
odium of revolting and incredible dogmas? 

6. Now combine all the facts thus far named in 
one, and we have this resultant: That a sinner, 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 117 

incorrigible in guilt, matured in depraved tastes, 
at the climax of ripened evil, malignant through 
all the ramifications of his being, enamored of evil 
as his supreme desire, makes his own hell. Nothing 
conceivable as within God's power to inflict, or 
man's imagination to conceive, can form a destiny 
of more fearful woe. No damnation can surpass 
that which a malign being inflicts upon himself. 
Milton's Satan has the gist of the whole doctrine, 
— " Myself am Hell." The literature of tragedy 
in its picturing of remorse abounds with the same 
conception. And this a guilty being at the summit 
of matured character chooses as his own. He has 
created and nurtured his own demonized passions. 
He chooses and seeks his demonized associates. 
He elects as his abode the place allotted to a 
demonized society. 

Swedenborg had one revelation which is true 
to nature, though one may not believe it the more 
for his saying it. He declares that angels taught 
him that " God never thrusts a man into Hell : he 
thrusts himself in." He says elsewhere, speaking 
of spirits who had lived wickedly here, yet were 
taken temporarily into heaven, that "They gasp 
there, as for breath, and writhe about like fishes 
out of the water in the atmosphere, and like ani- 
mals in the receiver of an air-pump, the air being 
exhausted." 

This accords with all that we know of the nature 
of moral being. In a spiritual world, state must 
be as character. The being chooses that it should 



118 My Study : and Other Essays. 

be so. Place and character at enmity engender 
acutest misery. Lost man, therefore, goes to Hell 
of his own accord. His whole moral nature gravi- 
tates thither. Like seeks its like. Set a lost man 
adrift in the universe, with a free pass to go where 
he will, and he will seek society of his own rank. 
Guilt will define the frightful caste to which he 
will of choice ally himself. Heaven, were its 
doors wide open to him, would be a hell of pro- 
founder misery to him than the abode of despair. 
Any thing is a less evil, in his estimate, than exist- 
ing consciously in the presence and under the eye 
of a holy God. 

You remember, doubtless, the story told of 
Lafayette in the prison at Olmutz. His jailers 
received orders never to leave him one moment 
out of sight. Through a small aperture in the 
door of his dungeon, a human eye was to be 
always upon him. He said, when he was released, 
that all other tortures of that solitary cell were as 
nothing to him, in comparison with the unremit- 
ting consciousness of that human eye. He declared 
that in time it would have crazed him. So I con- 
ceive a lost man in eternity would flee, were it 
possible, from the eye of God. God's presence 
makes Heaven a hell to his distorted tastes. You 
will recall, from St. John's vision, the " Rocks and 
mountains, fall on us ! " Any thing, any place, any 
society, any solitude, any chaos, is welcome in the 
struggle to get away from God ! This is sin in its 
innate gravitation ! It must be realized in the 
final evolution of a sinner's destiny. 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 119 

This process of moral segregation has its begin- 
ning in this world. It imperceptible in the volun- 
tary working of moral affinities. The good and 
the evil drift asunder. The good seek the society 
of the good, and the evil that of the evil. Elec- 
tive affinities incline each one to his moral kindred. 
Like goes to its like. The cleavage is not com- 
pulsory : it is voluntary. Its lines are perceptible 
through all the strata of society. So, in the rela- 
tion of men to God, the wicked do not cultivate 
communion with Him. Wicked men are commonly 
1 prayerless men. As they approach the maturity 
of consolidated character, in which opinions are 
fixed, tastes developed, habits confirmed, they 
have less and less to do with God and godly men. 
One such honest correspondent of mine confesses, 
" The time when I must meet God is unwelcome 
to me. I do not think of it twice in a year. I 
never think of it when I can help it." This process 
of moral alienation, at its completion, may be one 
phase of the " departure " which God decrees at 
the final judgment. Estrangement from God at its 
climax is a voluntary going into outer darkness. 
This it is to be " accursed." Every moral being 
carries the possibility of it in his nature. 

7. This liability to a voluntary abandonment of 
all good by a moral being results from the same 
conditions which render possible his blessedness 
in God. 

Nature's law from least to greatest things is a 
law of mysterious duality. The possibilities of all 



120 My Study: and Other Essays. 

things are massed in two directions. The same 
constitution of any thing which is capable of good 
is also capable of evil. The nerve which can give 
pleasure can also give pain. The make of your 
eyeball, which discovers a world of delight to 
your sense of beauty, may rack your brain with 
agony under the ravages of that insect discovered 
by Dr. Graefe, whose natural food is the optic 
nerve. The even heart-beats which send life 
throbbing through your frame with no conscious 
will of yours, may, in the twinkling of an eye, 
become the throes of angina pectoris. 

We do not know, that, in the nature of things, 
this dual economy could have been dispensed with. 
We only see that it exists. It runs through all 
the ramifications of human life. From a tooth- 
ache to a soul's damnation, all evil displaces corre- 
sponding good, which, in the nature of things, was 
equally possible. Nothing has been created for 
the sake of evil. No nerve exists for the sake of 
pain ; no temptation for the sake of sin ; no devil 
for the sake of his malignity. Balancing possi- 
bilities of good offset them all. 

This dual structure governs the system of man's 
probationary discipline and its eternal sequences. 
By as much as a man may be demonized in char- 
acter, and therefore accursed in destiny, by so 
much may he be made godlike in both. Endless 
blessing and endless curse are in the balance of 
every man's destiny. The weight which tips the 
scale is the breath of his own choice. That, the 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 121 

winds of heaven are not permitted to visit too 
roughly. Not legions of demoniac tempters can 
force him to make that choice to his own hurt. 
God guards its freedom as the apple of His eye. 
No power but its own can destroy a soul. 

8. The principle of liberty in human destiny by 
which a lost man achieves his own perdition, needs 
to be offset by another. It is that God expresses 
in the inevitable misery of sin His own retributive 
sentiment as a moral governor. He impresses thus 
upon the universe His own abhorrence of guilt. 
The paradox is essential to the truth in its com- 
pleteness, that man creates his own damnation, 
and that God inflicts it. This complication is no 
anomaly : it exists in all those phenomena in which 
God and man unite in one result. The two agen- 
cies intermingle. God decrees what man per- 
forms. Retributive decrees are executed by man 
in self-destruction. 

We lose one of the prime elements of punitive 
justice if we so project man's self-ruin as to con- 
ceal the fact of the divine infliction. This is never 
the manner of the Scriptures. There the divine 
infliction is emphasized: it is made a theme of 
devout adoration. No hint is given that it needs 
hiding from an upright mind. In the nature of 
things, this can not be. We know God only as we 
know ourselves. The same retributive sentiment 
in kind must exist in Him as in us. It finds ex- 
pression, as ours does, in the infliction of retribu- 
tive pains on the incorrigibly guilty. Among the 



122 My Study: and Other Essays. 

most amiable attributes of the divine character in 
the biblical estimate, is that holy abhorrence of 
sin which goes out from His inmost nature in re- 
tributive inflictions. Without it He would be no 
longer God: He could no longer command the 
affectionate reverence of the holy universe, or the 
compulsory respect of the guilty and the damned. 

We must not, then, in deference to our debil- 
itated sensibilities, put into hiding the personal 
agency of God in the doom of the lost. It involves 
no contradiction. Nor does it display any more 
mystery than that which exists in all other phe- 
nomena in which the agency of God and that of 
man are interblended. The sowing and the reap- 
ing of a wheat-field are in this respect the same as 
the sowing and the reaping of an eternal destiny. 
The laws of the soil and the sun and the rains are 
God's will : man's use of them is man's will. So 
in moral government, man's use of his own being 
to his own destruction is his own doing ; the make 
of that being by which, if perverted, it becomes 
suicidal to its own happiness, is God's infliction of 
retributive justice. 

9. The numbers of the lost, I conceive, do not 
enter into the main question at all. If there is 
one lost being in the universe, the mystery of it 
is as profound as if there were countless millions. 
The question of proportions we have no means 
of solving. When an inquiry on that subject was 
addressed to our Lord, He evaded an answer. I 
can make a good showing, I think, for the belief 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 123 

that the saved will be the immense majority, and 
the lost an inconsiderable fraction of the sum-total 
of the race. But God has chosen to withhold the 
truth from us, and speculation is useless. Each 
one of us has enough to do to make his own 
salvation sure, and to lead as many others to 
Heaven as he can on the way. But when men 
pronounce this a lost world, meaning by it that 
the great majority of the race will at last people 
the world of despair, they affirm more than I find 
in the Word of God. 

The question of the numbers of the lost, I repeat, 
does not affect the argument one whit. But it may 
aggravate the dramatic impression of the truth on 
our sensibilities. The tragic look of the retribu- 
tive element in the divine economy is the more 
appalling as the numbers multiply who incur its 
execution. Objection to the doctrine is mainly a 
matter of feeling. Men feel the same in kind, and 
often their judgment is distorted by it in their 
estimate of human government. Why is it so 
difficult to find jurymen for a capital trial ? Why 
is it that imprisonment for life, though often in 
the sentence, is rarely in its execution ? If a thief 
is running from the sheriff, why does the crowd in 
the street help the thief? Reason is not clear- 
headed if sympathy is overloaded. 

Therefore it is pertinent to relieve the present 
argument from the pressure of overstrained sensi- 
bilities. The fact should be emphasized, that the 
Scriptures nowhere affirm that the major part of 



124 My Study: and Other Essays. 

mankind are doomed in the retributive purposes 
of God. The Bible says nothing about majorities. 
It offers to all men a free salvation. What their 
free action will be, it says not. I prefer to leave 
the question of proportion where God has lodged 
it, — in His kingdom of reserve. We make a wise 
advance, and achieve a grand conquest over dif- 
ficulties, when we learn to accept in silence the 
silences of God. That which He has not seen fit 
to disclose, we have no call to affirm or to deny. 



XL 
RETRIBUTION IN THE LIGHT OF REASON. 

PART II. 

Some additional suggestions are necessary to a 
rounded statement of the subject, as I am accus- 
tomed to put it to my own mind. Proceeding in 
numerical order for the sake of definiteness, I 
remark, — 

10. That the real difficulties of the faith I hold, 
I freely admit. They are very great, and some of 
them inexplicable. I do not say unanswerable, but 
inexplicable. My faith may answer them when 
my reason can not solve them. Make them what 
you will, I think I could double your estimate. 
The whole subject is a gloomy and heaving sea to 
my troubled vision. I see through a glass darkly. 
I can not say that forty years of study of what 
good and able men, on both sides of the question, 
have thought upon it, have added any thing to a 
solution of the mystery. They have only relieved 
the doctrine — and this is much to the purpose 
of answering difficulties — of contradictions and 
other infelicities of statement in its ancient forms. 
"Seraphic doctors" have spent their force upon 

125 



126 My Study : and Other Essays. 

the mystery in vain. " Advanced thinkers " have 
quailed before it, and found refuge in defiant and 
illogical denials. A new generation has come upon 
the stage since we were young, and new genera- 
tions often bring with them new solutions of old 
problems; but no new thing in religion or in 
philosophy has advanced human thought one jot 
towards a solution of this one. Thinkers stand 
aghast before it as they did four thousand years 
ago, perhaps, when the patriarch inquired in his 
inexplicable misery, " Wherefore do the wicked 
live?" That question, extended from this to 
other worlds, finds no answer. The ages are 
dumb before it. There lies the fact of evil and 
its penal fires embedded in the Christian theology, 
and there it lies in reduplicated gloom in the 
theology of nature. To me it looks as terrific as 
when it first threw its lurid glare over my childish 
conceptions of human destiny. I concede all this. 
I will not shrink from any sequence in the argu- 
ment which may fairly be derived from the con- 
cession. 

But the mystery of a truth is one thing; the 
evidence of the fact, another. My belief has to 
do only with the evidence of the fact. In the 
point of fact, I find that reason and revelation 
conspire to bear witness to one thing. This differ- 
ence only, I discover, — that reason is the more 
formidable and portentous of the two. Reason is 
merciless in its teachings. The only remedial or 
remonstrant force I find, which is at all commen- 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 127 

surate with the ravages of sin in this world, I read 
in the words of Jesus Christ. The depth saith it 
is not in me, and the sea saith it is not with me. 
Nature is mute as the Sphinx. 

I find the mystery, however, not where you 
seem to locate it. Why God should have created 
beings who would weave around themselves the 
network of the endless curse, is the mystery which 
I do not pretend to solve. On that problem, I 
profess no belief. None is required by the Word 
of God, as I interpret it : none is suggested by 
the book of Nature. But that some men should 
go to an accursed world, sin and sinners being 
what they are, is no mystery. Where else can 
they go in a spiritual universe? That there 
should be a Hell, sin and sinners at their climax 
of moral growth being what they are, is no mys- 
tery. What other place is in moral affinity with 
them? Such a world is inevitable, in the nature 
of things, in a universe in which sin is embattled 
against God behind the ramparts of moral freedom. 

That which Emerson goes out of his way to call 
"the vindictive mythology of Calvinism," is, in 
this respect, only a reprint of the theology of 
nature. Both are dumb before the grim facts 
of sin and pain. The mystery of both, a deist is 
as much bound to explain as I am. If he is an 
honest inquirer, he will confess, as I do, that the 
reasons why God should permit such evils to rav- 
age the universe which He has created are beyond 
our comprehension. Their duration has no con- 



128 My Study: and Other Essays. 

cern with the problem. Their existence for eter- 
nity is no more inexplicable than their existence 
for an hour. Their being at all in the realm of 
an almighty and benevolent God is the insoluble 
mystery. 

But must I therefore withhold my faith from 
the facts ? An affirmative to this reaches a long 
way. If I refuse to believe every thing, the 
reasons of which are beyond my depth, my creed 
must be conveniently brief. Even the testimony 
of my senses can not do much for me. To a 
believer in the infinity of God and the finiteness 
of man, it can not be philosophical to be over- 
whelmed by the existence of difficulties in the 
divine administration. To cower before seeming 
contradictions even, is not manly. Dr. Arnold 
manifested the self-collection of a philosophical 
and manly mind, when, as his biographer describes 
him, " Before a confessed and unconquerable diffi- 
culty his mind reposed as quietly as in possession 
of a discovered truth." Such, I conceive, should 
be the poise of a believer in the biblical doctrine 
of retribution. 

Dr. Paley has recorded a principle which every 
wise man finds use for in such researches as these. 
It is, in substance, that we should never suffer 
what we know to be disturbed by what we do not 
know. Bishop Butler, too, — the mind to which 
the Christian world owes more than to any other 
for the solid anchorage of faith, — lays down a law 
which unbelievers in the retributive teachings of 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 129 

Christianity will do well to remember : " If a 
truth be established, objections are nothing. The 
one is founded on our knowledge ; the other, on 
our ignorance." 

11. You seem to me to make much — too much 
— of the concessions, like those which I here make, 
and which are often made by believers in this doc- 
trine, to the effect that it wounds and shocks our 
sensibilities. Other disbelievers have done the 
same. So much has been said of the concessions 
made by the Rev. Albert Barnes, in his sermon 
entitled " The love of God in the gift of a Saviour," 
to which you refer, that I venture to say here what 
I believe he meant to express by those remarkable 
passages. They have been interpreted as evidence 
that in heart he did not and could not believe the 
dogma he professed to teach. We are told that it 
is too horrible for any sane man's credence, and 
that we know it. 

Let me say, then, what I personally know of 
the theologic temper of believers in the doctrine, 
and specially that of Albert Barnes. We make 
concessions in good faith. We believe them to be 
due to candor in the argument, and to the honest 
convictions of unbelievers. They are entitled to 
all that can be fairly inferred from such conces- 
sions. We have no secret faith to shield, no mental 
reservations to save us from contradiction. But 
they do not detract from the faith we profess one 
whit. It is because that faith. rests, as we think, 
on an impregnable groundwork, that we are able 



130 My Study: and Other Essays. 

to make them. To our own minds, they are an 
expression of our unwavering confidence. Our 
habit of mind on this whole class of truths is one 
of repose in the wisdom and rectitude of God. 
We believe them because we believe in God. Their 
unfathomable mystery we leave to Him. We be- 
lieve, that, in some way, the endless suffering of 
endless guilt is not only consistent with, but is 
itself, a signal illustration of the benevolence of 
God. We expect one day to see this as we can 
not now. We do already see in part. We see 
that, assuming the existence of guilt as a volun- 
tary evil, the suffering follows as an inevitable 
sequence, for which God is not responsible. The 
mystery of His permission of the guilt in His moral 
government, we expect under improved conditions 
of research in another life to be able to solve. In 
this expectant faith we rest, waiting for our Lord's 
appearing. We think this as reasonable, as philo- 
sophical, as the expectant faith of Leverrier, when 
he declared, reasoning from astronomical phenom- 
ena, that, in a certain spot in the heavens, a new 
star must oue day appear. Such I have reason to 
know is the prevailing equipoise of mind on this 
subject among the vast majority of believers. 

I knew Albert Barnes. I had such intimacy 
with him as a youthful friend has with his senior 
and pastor. I know that the " surprising confes- 
sions " of which you speak, were not indicative of 
any, even momentary, relaxation of his faith. He 
felt the same recoil of sensibility from the theology 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 131 

of nature which he confessed from the biblical 
revelation of an endless Hell. In his theological 
temperament he was one of the calmest of men. 
His faith, as it ultimately crystallized in his mind, 
was evenly balanced and self-consistent. It was a 
crescent faith to the last. He entered on manhood 
with not a shred of inherited belief. He held that 
form of infidelity which is not the fruit of an un- 
godly life, to which men flee for refuge from a con- 
demning conscience : it was the result of an honest 
intellectual inability to receive the current evi- 
dences of Christianity. From that point he fought 
his way against the redoubled forces of skeptical 
science, which characterized the times, till every 
doctrine of the biblical system had fixed itself in 
his mind with the authority of original discovery. 
He had inherited none" of it. In that faith he lived 
and died. 

Is it manly controversy to use the concessions 
of a candid thinker like him as proof of secret 
unbelief or doubt ? He meaht no such thing by 
them, and felt none. Neither do the great major- 
ity of believers in an endless punishment, when 
they grant in the argument the appalling nature 
of the truth in its bearing upon their sympathies 
as men. They would be less than men if they did 
not feel it, yet in their own estimate they would 
be less than Christian men if they did not believe 
it. 

12. The difficulties of our faith in endless retri- 
bution seem immensely less to our minds than 



132 My Study: and Other Essays. 

those of disbelief. Faith in it is wrapped up in 
our faith in the Scriptures as a revelation from 
God. The doctrine is so obvious and pervasive in 
the New Testament, that the rejection of the one 
necessitates the rejection of the other. The two 
stand or fall together. Expurgate the doctrine 
wherever we find it there, and not enough would 
be left to be called a revelation from Heaven. 
The expurgations would riddle the whole of it 
with exceptions. 

Our Lord certainly teaches the doctrine if it can 
be taught in human speech. I never knew an 
earnest educated unbeliever in the Bible, and to 
that extent an impartial looker-on upon our rival 
faiths, who did not find in it the revelation of an 
endless Hell. Did you ? Theodore Parker found 
it there. Voltaire and David Hume found it there. 
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, Strauss and 
Renan, have all found it there. If it is not there, 
human language can not contain it in intelligible 
words. The attempt to expurgate the Christian 
Scriptures of the doctrine by exegetical adroitness 
is without exception the most astounding example 
of special pleading in the history of religious con- 
troversy. Respectable science it is not. Men who 
believe it to be true, must have a secret fear that 
it is not so. As to the common readers of the 
Bible who come to it with no scholastic theory to 
defend, they have no conception of what we mean 
when we tell them that the doctrine of eternal 
retribution is not expressed in the teachings of our 
Lord. 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 133 

Reason makes another point respecting the ex- 
clusion of this doctrine from the Scriptures. If 
we accept the principle of interpretation which 
that exclusion involves, we must find room for all 
its corollaries. If, then, we allow our moral in- 
stincts to explain away the retributive teachings 
of Christ, we must allow the moral instincts of 
other men to explain away any thing and every 
thing else to which they take exception. The 
Sermon on the Mount would long ago have been 
foredoomed by the moral instincts of Sparta. The 
refined idolatry of Athens would have expunged 
the Decalogue. The moral nature of the Ameri- 
can aborigines would have laughed at the beati- 
tudes. Savage intuitions the world over would 
have scouted St. Paul's picture of Christian char- 
ity. Not a solitary doctrine or sentiment or song 
or prophecy in the Scriptures which modern civil- 
ization exalts for its profound truth, or pure moral- 
ity, or poetic beauty, can be named which some- 
body's " ethical instincts " have not denounced 
and hooted at. 

When John Eliot first preached to the Nipmuck 
Indians at Nonantum the Christian theory of the 
forgiveness of injuries, a grunt of incredulous 
derision ran around the circle of his hearers as 
they sat before him on their haunches. The 
" moral intuitions " of Nipmuck culture knew bet- 
ter than tli at. On the theory here combated, the 
Nipmuck theology was right. Why not ? 

But what is a revelation worth which must 



134 My Study: and Other Essays. 

" stand and deliver " at the door of every wigwam 
where the Nipmuck nature in man may see fit to 
challenge its authority ? Our moral instincts are 
a better guide without than with a craven revela- 
tion which may be so shorn of its dignity by every 
passer-by. The boar out of the wood doth waste 
it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it. 
Coleridge very shrewdly says, " Christianity can 
not probably be of much worth to men who pay it 
no other compliment than that of calling by its 
name the previous decisions of their own mother- 
wit." This is precisely what those do who inter- 
polate into the Scriptures their own moral instincts 
in flat contradiction to the plainest records of 
inspiration. Better, far better, is no revelation at 
all than one which must be constantly confounded 
by the " mother-wit " of the reader. 

In accepting the facts of the revelation we have, 
and in accepting the relief it gives to the equally 
inexplicable facts of nature, leaving the mysteries 
of both unsolved, do I not choose the faith which 
is infinitely the more credible, the more hopeful, 
the more consonant with reason and with the 
intimations of conscience? Faith in an infinite 
God, without infinite mysteries and insoluble dif- 
ficulties, would be a contradiction. " A God 
understood is no God at all." 

13. It amazes me that you find it so difficult to 
believe in retributive government in the moral 
world when the natural world is so full of it. The 
logic of analogy is all one way. Where is the 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 135 

solitary exception ? When does Nature ever for- 
give ? Strike at a law of nature ever so playfully, 
and something within it will strike back. You 
will get the worst of it. You may as safely play 
with a nest of rattlesnakes. Nature never allows 
herself to be insulted with impunity. You are 
always on your good behavior in dealing with her. 
She may take her time for the retaliatory blow : 
she is too sure of her victim to be in haste. But 
the blow will come, and with reduplicated force 
for the waiting. 

Pagan theology found out long ago that the 
mills of the gods grind slow, but that they grind 
to powder. All nations have the proverb in their 
own way. Why should not the mills grind in the 
same way in the moral world ? God in conscience, 
and God in nature, are one Being. He will not 
contradict in one kingdom the law He has enacted 
in the other. To deny it seems to me insanely 
unphilosophical and inconsecutive. 

Besides, the fact deserves to be repeated that 
nature is vastly more relentless than the Scriptures 
in her retributive teachings. Swedenborg says 
that "nature makes almost as much demand on 
our faith as miracles do." She makes more. Her 
retributive dealings are harder to understand, more 
difficult to reconcile with the perfections of God. 
Not a gleam of redemptive promise do we find in 
the world of matter. Order and sequence there, are 
always the order and sequence of law, never those 
of remedial devices. The iron rod is never laid 



136 My Study: and Other Essays. 

aside, never broken, never bent out of plumb. It 
is not Calvinism that is " vindictive : " it is gravita-? 
tion. If you wish to find the original of the old 
Greek Nemesis, you must go, not to the sacred 
books of Christianity, but to the volumes of mod- 
ern science which treat of the laws of mechanics, 
of electricity, of heredity. There, if anywhere, is 
vengeance. 

The God we worship is one God. Then, His 
handiwork in nature should lead us to expect the 
disclosure of endless penalty for endless guilt in a 
revelation of His moral government. If it were 
not there, an unanswerable presumptive argument 
would be established that it is not a revelation 
from heaven. 

14. One thing more, and my story is ended. 
The use so often made of the biblical symbol of 
fire to make the retributive idea odious and hide- 
ous, seems to me unworthy of manly and cultured 
controversy. We must expect it from ignorant 
and passionate thinkers, but as argument it is 
very shallow. You and I do not need to remind 
each other that that symbol is not a dogmatic form 
of truth. The veriest tyro in biblical interpreta- 
tion ought to know it. In common speech we em- 
ploy the same and similar figures to express vividly 
similar ideas. We speak of "burning passions," 
of " fiery lusts," of " flaming anger." We tell of 
a man who frothed at the mouth, or ground his 
teeth, in impotent rage. Our Saviour takes sim- 
ilar liberties with dramatic and figurative speech. 



Retribution in the Light of Reason. 137 

Suppose, now, that some one should report us as 
affirming that we saw a man roasting over a slow 
fire in his lusts, or showing signs of hydrophobia in 
his wrath. Would that be argument ? He might 
raise a ripple of inane laughter at his conceit, but 
would he discredit our story ? 

So I take all attempts of men to render odious 
or ridiculous the doctrine of endless punishment 
by putting the symbol of fire to a use for which it 
was never employed by Him who originated it. 
In His lips it meant the most solemn and appalling 
reality in the history of the universe, so far as it 
is known to us. It meant that guilt, at its climax 
of finished and indurated character, involves in its 
own nature, and by inevitable sequence, a spiritual 
misery of which literal speech can give no adequate 
conception. It is such that no other material 
emblem can give us so truthful an impression of 
it as that of a surging sea of flame. This, if it be 
a reality, of which some who walk our streets, and 
give us daily greeting, may be in peril, is too ter- 
rific a reality to be set in the frame of burlesque. 
Is it not ? 

Very truly yours, 

In the fellowship of search for truth, 

AUSTIN PHELPS. 



XII. 
ENDLESS SIN UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF GOD. 

Is its existence consistent with the Divine char- 
acter ? On this inquiry ultimately hang all objec- 
tions to the retributive teachings of the Scriptures. 
Obvious as those teachings are on the face of them, 
they will be nullified by violent and tortuous in- 
terpretations if the secret feeling of the reader 
is, that they are a calumny against God. As one 
objector expressed it in the argument, " Your God 
is my Devil." So long as this conception of the 
doctrine exists, argument is useless. The plainest 
assertions of the Bible go for nothing. A book, 
no matter what its claims to inspiration are, which 
ascribes Satanic character to God, its professed 
author, can have no force as an authority to a 
reasonable mind. 

The question narrows itself in the last analysis 
to the endless existence of Sin. Suffering is not 
the mystery of this world. Sin is the mystery. 
Assume sin as the great moral fact of its history, 
and no suffering is inexplicable. Sin and suffer- 
ing — suffering and sin — are twin factors in hu- 
man destiny. Can, or will, a benevolent God create 

138 



Sin Under the Government of Gf-od. 139 

beings — millions or one, it makes no difference — 
who, He knows, will sin for ever? This is the 
crucial question. 

1. In reply, let it be observed that we do not 
know that the prevention of sin, under a perfect 
system of moral government, is possible to the 
power of God. In the constitution of things, — 
we utter a truism in saying it, — some contingen- 
cies involve contradictions. God can not decree 
absurdities. He can not so change the mathemati- 
cal relations of numbers, that, to the human mind, 
twice five shall be less or more than ten. God 
can not so metamorphose the nature of colors, 
that, their relations to the human eye remaining 
what they are, black and white shall change places 
in our vision, or the sky be green, and the grass 
blue. God can not so transmute the pleasures of 
the senses, that, their nature remaining unchanged, 
the eye shall delight in a symphony of Beethoven, 
and the ear in the " Sistine Madonna." These 
are changes which God is as powerless to effect as 
man. They involve absurdities. They bear no 
relation to omnipotent power. 

For aught that we know, this same principle may 
pervade the moral universe. We live under moral 
government. Our chief distinction is the posses- 
sion of a moral nature. Within the limits pre- 
scribed to moral freedom, a moral being, be he man 
or angel or devil, is as imperial in his autocracy as 
God is in the immeasurable range of His being. 
This, God has Himself ordained in the creation of 



140 My Study: and Other Essays. 

a moral universe. Moral freedom is a prerogative 
of godlike nobility. It is the chief thing in which 
man is God's image. The stellar universe is not 
equal in imperial dignity to one thinking, sentient, 
self-determining mind. Man's supreme endowment 
is not immortality : it is his ability to be what he 
wills to be, to do what he chooses to do, to become 
what he elects to become in his growth of ages. 
This ethereal faculty in man eludes analysis. 
Beyond the tamest of tame words, no man can 
define or describe it. A child can exercise it, but 
royal academies can not tell me what it is. It 
is the ultimate and superlative something which 
makes man a man. Without it, he would have no 
right to say " I." Without it, a humming-bird is 
his equal : with it, he is the kindred of angels. 

Now, we do not know that such an imperial 
being, remaining sovereign of his moral freedom, 
autocrat of himself, creator of his own character, 
framer of his own destiny, can be kept under all 
conditions of probation from a moral catastrophe. 
There is more than a poet's fancy in Wordsworth's 
conception of " man's unconquerable mind." Mind 
is as absolute over its own act in evil as in good. 
From the nature of the case, therefore, it can not 
be proved that a being who can sin will not sin. 
Power to do is itself temptation to do. " The free- 
will tempted me, — the power to do, or not to do," 
says Coleridge's Wallenstein. Few men can stand 
on the summit of a lofty tower without a momen- 
tary sense of peril in the consciousness of power 



Sin Under the Government of God. 141 

to plunge headlong. A special police guard the 
Colonne Vendome in Paris, to prevent that form 
of suicide. So fascinating often is the power to 
do an evil deed! 

The same fascination is involved in the con- 
sciousness of moral freedom under the government 
of God. Its possibilities of good are balanced by 
equal possibilities of evil. Which shall become 
history depends on the tempted being, and ulti- 
mately on him only. His biography, in this par- 
ticular, is autobiography. His own hand holds 
the iron pen. In the case of man, therefore, we 
do not know but that God could not have saved 
him from the fall, except by annihilating his moral 
freedom : or, if not that, inflicting some unknown 
damage, which to his moral destiny would be 
equivalent. True, we can not affirm that it was 
so ; but we must prove that it was not so before 
we can reasonably charge God with wrong in the 
permission and punishment of incorrigible sin. 

2. We do not know that the prevention of sin, 
under a perfect moral government, was possible 
to the wisdom of God. The infinite and eternal 
expediencies of the moral universe may have for- 
bidden it. We do not know the interminable 
complications of any act of God. A moment's 
thought is enough to baffle us in the inquiry. 
Nothing that He does is unrelated. Every thing 
is linked by invisible chains of sequence and 
causation to every other thing. A sublime unity 
compacts together all His ways. His dominion is 



142 My Study: and Other Essays. 

imperial : one aim, one plan, one animus, rules the 
whole. Speaking in the dialect of human govern-* 
ments, one policy sways the universe. God never 
unravels His own decrees. There are no contra^ 
ries and confusions in the system of things. Law 
here is law there. Orion does not collide with 
the Pleiades, and the Pleiades do not jostle Orion. 
One force holds all things to their grooves. " He 
is of one mind, and who can turn Him ? " 

The same unity belongs, so far as we know, 
to moral law. We do not know, therefore, the 
remote consequences of a policy chosen for the 
administration of one world. It may have invis- 
ible convolutions and reticulations in the history 
of other worlds. To have chosen the policy of 
prevention in the control of sin here, might have 
necessitated revolutionary changes elsewhere. As- 
tronomers say that a minute less or more in the 
diurnal revolution of Jupiter, gravitation remain- 
ing as it is, would sooner or later fill the universe 
with clashing planets. A change of proportion 
in certain chemical elements, which now lie peace- 
fully side by side in the bowels of the earth, would 
rend the globe asunder. Who can prove that 
there are not similar niceties of adjustment in the 
working of moral laws? To have prevented sin 
here, by any power not fatal to moral freedom, 
might have shattered the foundation of moral 
government everywhere. True, we can not affirm 
it, but neither can we deny it. 

We reasonably ask, then, may it not have been 



Sin Under the Government of God. 143 

conceivably better that one world should have 
been left to voluntary ruin than that all worlds 
should have been void of populations of intelligent 
and moral beings ? That some inhabitants of one 
such fallen world should be left unrepentant to the 
doom they have chosen, — is not even this a less 
appalling calamity than that the history of sinless 
worlds without number should have remained un- 
written ? Shall all best things in the universe be 
forbidden, that some may be saved from abuse ? 

We affirm, then, in view of such unanswerable 
questions, that it may not have been possible to 
the wisdom of God to prevent the entrance of sin 
and consequent retribution into the moral universe 
through the history of man. Infinite expediency 
may have been against it. True, we can not affirm 
that it was so ; but we must prove that it was not 
so, before we can charge God with wrong in the 
infliction of endless retribution upon endless sin. 

3. If it may not be possible to divine power, 
and if it may not be possible to divine wisdom, to 
prevent sin in a perfect moral government, then 
we affirm further that it may not be possible to 
divine benevolence. A benevolent God can do 
only things in their nature practicable. He can 
do only wise things. He can do only that which 
infinite power can do under the direction of infinite 
wisdom. 

The non-prevention of sin, therefore, in this 
world of ours may have been the best thing which, 
under the conditions here existing, benevolence 



144 My Study: and Other Essays. 

could desire and plan for. Speaking after the 
manner of human governments, the policy of non- 
intervention may have been the policy of love. 
In other departments of God's working, that 
policy often assumes to our short-sighted vision 
frightful developments. 

To accomplish, in certain contingencies, the 
purposes of benevolence, man must be let alone. 
The laws of nature must be allowed to do what 
they will with him. Invisible and inodorous gases 
in the atmosphere must poison his life-blood. Un- 
seen tempters must be let loose upon him. Malign 
influences must contest the supremacy in his des- 
tiny. Individual well-being must be overborne 
by the fall of nations. Majorities must crush the 
few. Great wheels must crumple up the little 
wheels. Infancy and helplessness must go under 
the hoof of power. Above all, man's own will 
must often be left in moral solitude. It must 
work out his destiny, for weal or woe, alone. For 
reasons unknown, God must stand aloof, and be 
still, while the tragedy of life goes on. Such is 
sometimes the look of things to our bleared vision. 

Now, the point of the present argument is, that 
this principle of non-interference may lie back of, 
and under, the non-prevention of sin. Within cer- 
tain bounds, and as related to the destiny of certain 
races, and in certain contingencies of moral trial, 
to let sin alone may be the dictate of benevolence. 
Who can say that it is not so ? To leave guilt in 
the awful extremity of evil, to which it naturally 



Sin Under the Government of God. 145 

gravitates by the force of its own momentum, may 
sometimes be the first and last and best decree of 
infinite benignity. 

True again, reasoning from the nature of things, 
we can not affirm that it is so ; but the fact perti- 
nent to the present argument is, that we must 
prove that it is not so, before we can hold God 
unworthy in His treatment of endless guilt by the 
infliction of endless pain. 

4. The views already advanced involve another, 
which demands a distinct development. 

It is that we do not know that the prevention 
of sin is possible under that feature of God's moral 
government by which the universe is bound to- 
gether in a community of interests like those of a 
human family. This is one of the devices of in- 
finite wisdom. We have observed that God's gov- 
ernment is a unit. It is more than this. It is a 
parental government. Angels and men are united 
in filial sympathies and affections. They are stu- 
dious of the same disclosures of God. Their expe- 
riences make up one great family history. The 
creation, the fall, and the recovery of this world, 
are themes of angelic as they are of human re- 
search. The ties which bind together human and 
angelic destinies are the ties of one household, of 
which Christ is the Head. In Heaven, as pictured 
by St. John, angels and men unite in the same 
liturgic service, sing the same songs of adoration, 
form one devout assembly. They surround God's 
throne in fraternal companionship. 



146 My Study: and Other Essays. 

How many more orders of intelligence people 
the universe, we do not know. Analogy suggests 
the probability that they are practically beyond 
computation. Telescopic research has never found 
the frontier of the sidereal creation. It is incredi- 
ble that so vast and complicated a system of mate- 
rial things is not filled, or to be filled, with moral 
systems of equal magnitude. We discover in the 
ways of God the element of aspiration. He is 
content only with best things. We reasonably 
infer, therefore, that our resplendent heavens are, 
or are to be, the abodes of intelligence and virtue, 
not of ichthyosauri and mastodons. If so, they are, 
or are to be, the homes of one immense family, over 
which God administers a paternal government. 
This earth is but an infinitesimal fragment. As 
proportioned to the planet Jupiter alone, our globe 
is of the size of a pea on a circular ground three 
or four inches in diameter. What must be its 
inconceivable minuteness as compared with the 
whole stellar universe ! Such is the probable 
diminutiveness of our human races in the com- 
parison with the whole family of the Heavenly 
Father. Most reasonably did the Psalmist antici- 
pate the discoveries of modern science, and exclaim, 
" When I consider the heavens, what is man ? " 

Relationships of family on a scale of such im- 
measurable amplitude must, speaking in human 
dialect, lay a heavy tax on the wisdom and benev- 
olence of God in the administration of His laws. 
To a human eye, it must be an administration of 



Sin Under the Government of God. 147 

inconceivable intricacy. Reasons for and against 
any policy of government must be of immeas- 
urable reach, and unfathomable depth. Problems 
which no human wisdom can solve, must be 
involved in its execution. Who, by searching, 
can find out God ? A wise and loving father can 
not seek the good of one child at the cost of all 
the rest. The interests of all are bound up in the 
welfare of each, and that of each in those of all. 
John Quincy Adams once amended the aphorism 
of human government, that "it should seek the 
greatest good of the greatest number." "No," 
said " the old man eloquent: " "Government should 
seek the greatest good of all" This is pre-em- 
inently true of God's parental government over 
the universal family. He can not wisely care for 
one being or one world without a thoughtful and 
parental adjustment of things to the welfare of all 
beings in all worlds. 

The project has been suggested, as one of pos- 
sible achievement in a future age, of a universal 
federation of all human governments by which all 
nations should be combined in one political broth- 
erhood, so that standing armies and the arbitra- 
ment of war and retaliatory policies should be 
no more. The bare thought of such interlocking 
without interfusion of conflicting interests op- 
presses a human mind with a sense of colossal 
intricacy. Yet this is but a remote suggestion of 
what the universal government of God must be 
through the intimacies of one spiritual family. 



148 My Study: and Other Essays. 

We are apt to be oblivious of the immense realm 
of the unknown in the alliances of human history 
with that of other orders of intelligence. Take 
the fall of this world, for example. How little we 
know of its remote and complicated relations ! 
What problems of mysterious import it must have 
started in distant places of creation ! It may have 
sent a shock, for which the fatherly government 
of God must provide counteraction, to the remotest 
frontier of populated space. The moral destiny 
of Sirius and Neptune may be bound up with ours. 
It may be, that the prevention of sin here by the 
only means possible or wise under the moral econ- 
omy which God has elected, would have been a 
work involving infinite impossibilities. To our 
angelic brethren, it may have seemed a perilous 
anomaly. 

Here it should be remembered that the govern- 
ment of sin by any other devices than those of 
free-will and restrictive retribution is anomalous to 
a loyal conscience. Speaking as we should of the 
devices of human law, we should pronounce it 
extra-constitutional. To cherubim and seraphim 
it might have threatened incalculable disaster to 
adopt a policy which should even have the look of 
tampering with the liberty of a free being. The 
history of the nameless orders of intelligence 
which may fill the unknown regions of space, may 
have contained in its archives no precedent for it. 
It may not, therefore, have been congenial with any 
principles of moral government known to them, 



Sin Under the Government of God. 149 

and fixed in their faith. It might have been pro- 
ductive of a violence to the moral sense of the 
universe infinitely more weighty in the general 
scale of evil, than to have chosen the policy of 
non-interference in the government of one world, 
and to have left it to its own chosen way of guilt 
and desolation. 

It is very true that conjectures like these open 
into a region of shadowy possibilities. Positive 
faith can not enter it one step. We do not know. 
Our vision is very dim. In such adventurous re- 
searches we soon come to the limit, even of con- 
jecture. We can not affirm, therefore, that one or 
another of these conjectures is true. But it is 
very much to the purpose of the present argument, 
that they indicate our boundless ignorance. This 
they prove beyond conceivable doubt. They block 
up our way solid with possibilities which we must 
disprove ; and this is the turning-point of the pres- 
ent argument, — that we must prove that they are 
not true, before we can hold God's government to 
account as unjust or inhuman because He has not 
saved all His intelligent creation from the endless 
penalties of endless guilt. The very measure of 
our ignorance is the measure of our reasonable 
faith. 

5. The argument as thus far developed implies 
one more phase of it which is worthy of emphatic 
notice. We do not know that the prevention of 
evil in this world, and of consequent retribution in 
eternity, is possible under that feature of God's 



150 My Study: and Other Essays. 

government by which evil is overruled, and made 
the instrument of good. 

This is one of the devices of infinite wisdom, 
which, like its source, may be infinite in the range 
of its working. How far it is concerned with the 
non-prevention of moral evil, we do not know. In 
certain conditions, it may be prohibitory of divine 
interference. Good in this world could not be 
what it is, but for the evil which often underlies 
it. Our sight into this mystery, too, is very short. 
Our ignorance is very dense. But we can not 
help seeing that the principle exists. We follow 
it a little way, and beyond we see that its possible 
range outreaches ail human thought. It goes into 
human history laden with infinite and strange con- 
tingencies. To all appearance, it has a mysterious 
power of contradiction. It appears often to make 
evil good. It brings to pass good which over- 
weighs a thousand-fold the evil which is used in 
the evolution. 

This law of the greater good from the lesser 
evil pervades the whole kingdom of nature. Every 
grain of wheat that germinates in the soil illus- 
trates it. It expands with reduplicated force in 
the sentient creation. Physicians say that the 
province of pain in the human system is one of 
benevolent design. Life could not long survive 
without its kindly ministration. " Pain," said an 
eminent German physiologist, "is the cry of the 
nerve for healthy blood." Like the cry of infancy, 
it is never without a reason. The whole history 



Sin Under the Government of God. 151 

of surgical science is the history of evil inflicted, 
that good might be enjoyed. 

On the grander scale of social and national life, 
the same law assumes gigantic proportions. What 
do not civilization and commerce owe to war? 
The very ideal of manly character, — how could 
the world ever have conceived it, but for the mili- 
tary virtues ? Eliminate from poetry and art all 
that these virtues have contributed, and what 
would be left ? Strike out from the history of na- 
tions all that human suffering has done for human 
liberty, and where would the great nations be to- 
day ? The world over, and through all time, good 
from evil, pleasure from pain, fruit from rotten- 
ness, growth from decay, strength from weakness, 
life from death, is the law of being. Enumerate 
the whole vocabulary of evil by which language 
expresses its varieties, and do you not find that 
every one has its opposite in the vocabulary of 
good, to which it is often tributary ? 

Pass over the line into the kingdom of grace. 
You find the same law there, in more magnificent 
working. God is never cheated of His purpose 
by the audacity of sin. Wicked men never get 
beyond the reach of His uses. They think not so, 
neither is it in their hearts. Unconsciously they 
serve His will in the very act of refusing. Demon- 
ized being never escapes from the hollow of His 
hand. He uses sin as grandly as an earthquake, 
and as easily as a violet. The vices of men are 
His instruments, though they be a flaming fire. 



152 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Tyrants create heroes ; inquisitors, martyrs ; devils, 
saints. At the foot of the cross, do we not stand 
dumb before the treachery of Judas ? It were 
good for that man if he had never been born, — 
but what of the good of other men? It might 
have been good for this world if it had never been, 
— but what of its mission to other worlds ? The 
whole heavens were darkened at the crucifixion, 
— but, without that event, what were the history 
of the universe ? 

We have reason to believe, therefore, that this 
law of the greater good from the lesser evil may 
enter into the reasons prevailing in the mind of 
God for the non-prevention of sin. We know not 
how far, nor to what magnitude of results. But 
we see so much as this, — that the usefulness of 
evil, as God rules and overrules it, is as legitimate 
as that of any other instrument of God's decrees. 
Its being evil does not forbid its use : the enormity 
of the evil does not seem to limit its use. If any 
law governs its instrumental value, it is, that the 
greater the evil, the more immense is the good 
extorted from its existence. The power and the 
wisdom of God for ever overreach and outweigh 
the force and the cunning of him who defies them. 
The wrath of man praises Him. 

It is true that this principle is a two-edged 
sword. We can not wield it but with reverent 
and tremulous hands. But all great principles 
are two-edged swords. This one warns us off 
from forbidden ground. It forbids us to accuse 



Sin Under the Government of God. 153 

God's wisdom or benevolence of wrong in not 
saving all His intelligent creation from the catas- 
trophe of sin and the doom of retribution. It 
may be that He can not do it without a sacrifice 
of the greater good to the lesser evil. The uni- 
verse might be shorn of half its glory as a monu- 
ment of God's character, if the principle of evolving 
good from evil were eliminated from its adminis- 
tion. 

Again, — we concede it, — we can not affirm 
that these things are so. Our ignorance grows 
more dense as we penetrate farther into these con- 
jectural researches. Does the objector urge that 
we know nothing about such themes of inquiry? 
We answer, " Very true ; and we affirm nothing." 
But the very pivot of the argument is, that, because 
we know nothing, we must not affirm the negative 
of God's integrity. We must prove that certain 
possibilities are not true, before we can venture 
to distrust either the revelations or the silences 
of God. Distrust, under such conditions, is as 
unphilosophical as it is ungodly. 



XIII. 
THE HYPOTHESIS OF A SECOND PROBATION. 

The theory of a continued probation after death 
is entitled to a respectful hearing. Those who are 
learned in the history of doctrine affirm that this 
theory has never received the exhaustive discussion 
which has been given to other fundamental doc- 
trines in the evolution of the faith of the Church. 
If so, it should receive such discussion now. Those 
who advocate it are entitled to our gratitude rather 
than our suspicion, so far as they have new truth, 
or new interpretations of old truth, to add to our 
beliefs. 

Especially should we welcome any new light 
which may dawn upon the fearful problem of end- 
less retribution. Fearful it is to the wisest of us. 
Unwavering as our faith is, we confess that it is 
an expectant faith, in which we wait for more 
light. We do not understand the mystery. We 
are dumb before its appalling darkness. We give 
the hand of welcome to any one who can help us 
to the light we crave. If the prospect of another 
probation, under conditions more favorable than 
those of this world, is the way out of the admitted 
difficulties, be it so, if it can but be proved as a 

154 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 155 

revealed, indubitable fact. It is but fair to sus- 
pend the ancient faith so far as may be needful to 
give to this new hypothesis a candid hearing. No 
authority of the ancient creeds should close the 
door upon progressive inquiry. 

But, as the process of discussion goes on, we 
need to be watchful of its bearings on the popular 
belief. Re-adjustments of old beliefs are neces- 
sarily subject to perilous contingencies. In the 
present case, belief is founded on revelation. A 
revelation from God must be assumed to be a gift 
to the popular mind. It is not a monopoly of 
schoolmen. The chief claim of the Bible to supe- 
riority over the philosophy of Plato is, that it is 
level, in its great central ideas, to popular compre- 
hension. It is intended to meet popular wants. 
If a truth is in it, the common mind can find it 
there. It has no contrasts of esoteric and exoteric 
dogmas. What it reveals to one, it reveals to all. 

A strong presumption, therefore, is created 
against a proposed interpretation, if any one of 
several contingencies appears. If that interpreta- 
tion can not be understood by the common mind ; 
if it does not commend itself to the common sense ; 
if it does not meet the religious necessities of com- 
mon life ; if it is of such a nature as to pervert the 
workings, or lower the tone, of the common con- 
science ; if, therefore, the practical drift of it is 
laxative rather than tonic in its effect on the 
solicitudes of men respecting their eternal destiny ; 
if all or any of these conditions accompany a pro- 



156 My Study : and Other Essays. 

posed interpretation of the Scriptures, — a strong 
presumption is thereby created that it is not true. 
This presumptive argument appears to be unan- 
swerable against the hypothesis of a continued 
probation after death. 

In the first place, the fact should be emphasized, 
that the popular mind will make no practical dis- 
tinction between a continued probation and a second 
probation. The distinction is a real one, and the 
advocates of the hypothesis are fairly entitled to 
all that can be made of it. Among experts in 
theological debate, it is not fair to ignore it. But 
it is equally true and equally important, if not 
more so, that the popular mind will ignore it in its 
practical use of the doctrine. No caution of reli- 
gious teachers can prevent this. The pulpit is 
powerless to neutralize it. Ages of settled belief 
have fixed in the popular theology the end of life 
as synchronous with the end of moral trial. All 
that lies beyond is a new existence. Death is the 
most absolute finality we know of. No other revo- 
lution conceivable in moral conditions can break 
the continuity of probation so radically and sum- 
marily. It impresses all minds, not prepossessed 
by an adverse theory, as the natural ending of this 
period of trial. If it is not such, that fact creates 
an anomaly in the divine order of things. Death 
puts an end to all other preliminaries to fixed 
destiny. The end is so absolute as to start pain- 
fully the inquiry whether the soul itself exists in 
the region beyond. Why, then, should it not put 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 157 

an end to this preliminary, — the moral trial for 
eternity ? 

Practically, therefore, to the popular mind, the 
question concerns a second period of probationary 
discipline. One such period ends : does another 
begin? In this phase of it, we must meet the 
question in the pulpit. In scholastic discussion, 
it may take the other form, and ought to be so 
treated ; but the pulpit must encounter it as it 
frames itself in the popular thought. We shall 
not, for any long time, hold the popular thought 
to any other. Discuss a continued probation in a 
morning's sermon, and hearers will be talking of 
a second probation before nightfall. 

A more serious peculiarity of the discussion, 
and one tending to relax the popular faith, is the 
hypothetical way in which the advocates of the new 
departure deny the ancient belief that the end of 
probation and the end of life are simultaneous. 
"If" we are told, "there are beings — infants, 
idiots, and some heathen — who have no fair trial 
in this life, they will not be denied such trial in 
another. If this world gives them no fair chance 
of salvation, another world will. If they have not 
known and intelligently rejected Christ here, they 
will not be debarred from the opportunity else- 
where. Beyond the grave, in Hades, in Paradise, 
in some city of refuge, in some prison of suspended 
destiny, such infirm souls, if they exist, shall find 
the gospel preached, and salvation offered." The 
corollary follows inevitably, that prayer for such 



158 My Study: and Other Essays. 

"spirits in prison " is not forbidden. Tacitly it" is 
encouraged. 

We pass over, for the present, the startling 
revolution which this novel theology proposes in 
the ancient theory, so dear to bereaved parents, 
of the destiny of those who die in infancy. The 
point which demands review, is that this hypo- 
thetical way of holding in suspense the ancient 
faith is fraught with peril. To a scholarly mind, 
in matters which are proper themes of scholastic 
debate, a hypothesis may be a very harmless thing. 
It may be a very necessary device in the initial 
stage of discussion. It is not such to the common 
mind, in matters of grave practical faith. Minds 
unused to speculative theology may find it difficult 
to deny a hypothesis so plausible as the one now in 
hand. They may not easily see where the fallacy 
lies. If two and two do not make four, they may 
make five. Why not ? Yet the hypothesis loosens 
the whole basis of mathematical demonstration. 
So, in the case now before us, the fallacy lies in 
the fact that the hypothesis contradicts known 
and indubitable truth. It loosens the foundation 
of much more than the truth in question. 

Apply the hypothetical method to truths not 
susceptible of demonstration, and to the common 
mind it may be revolutionary in its effect. It is 
likely to carry the force of assertion. Popular 
thinking does not hold truth long in solution. A 
precipitate is soon formed of positive belief or un- 
belief. Discourse in the hypothetical vein will 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 159 

soon be believed to affirm more than it does affirm. 
We shall be understood to deny more than we do 
deny. When confronted with the perils of our 
teaching, we may honestly shelter ourselves behind 
our hypotheses. Logically they protect us from 
the charge of error, because they affirm nothing. 
But the popular mind does not follow us to our 
retreat. We shall be quoted as holding a secret 
faith. That which we hold suspended on an " if," 
the common mind will hold in downright affirma- 
tion. The common sense of men is not diplomatic. 
It does not hold beliefs in reserve or in balance 
with provisos. It does not handle truth with 
silken gloves. 

Furthermore, on the subject of retribution the 
popular faith is quick to seek shelter from the 
terrific forms of inspired speech. If a chance is 
opened for escape from the old belief with a re- 
spectable show of scholarly authority, men spring 
to it. In the biblical forms we utter our faith in 
low and tremulous tones. It requires but a little 
impulse of doubt from trusted religious teachers, 
first to remand our belief into silence, and then to 
substitute for it more than the hypothetical nega- 
tion. Men will deny on this theme more than 
their teachers deny : they will believe on the nega- 
tive side more than their teachers believe. Such 
is the drift of the popular thinking. The descent 
from an old, high-toned, outspoken, uncompromis- 
ing type of the truth to a practical suspension, 
ending in a flat denial, is very facile. The road is 



160 My Study: and Other Essays. 

very smooth, made so by the tread of many feet. 
It needs often but the suggestion from a revered 
instructor of the hypothetical negative to invite 
the unwary to a surrender of faith. 

In few things is the superlative wisdom of 
inspiration, and especially that of our Lord, more 
obvious than in the unmitigated, peremptory, ab- 
solute revelation of eternal woe. In nothing does 
inspiration disclose more strikingly its prospective 
bearing in looking onward to after-times, and fore- 
stalling objections created by the effeminate senti- 
ment of ages to come. The revelation of retribu- 
tive purposes from the lips of our Lord is the divine 
ultimatum. In His imperative speech, the truth is 
relieved by no hypothesis to the contrary. It is 
diluted by no hint of exceptions. The eternal 
prospect is lighted up by no possibilities of re- 
prieve. Compromise and proviso are forestalled. 
The great gulf is fixed. The uttermost farthing 
shall be exacted. This is preaching great truth in 
great speech. No other way of putting the stern 
reality will ever hold the popular mind to it as a 
reality. Eelax its severity, and you destroy its 
tenacity. Give men the inch, and they will take 
the ell. Make the error possible, and they will 
make it sure. Llypothesis will be assertion, and 
plausibility will be proof. 

Probably not an ungodly man lives who does 
not believe, that, if there are to be any exceptions 
to the doom of incorrigible guilt, his own case will 
be one of them. Men trust to luck in this thing 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 161 

with awful temerity. They find some overbear- 
ing of temptation, some infelicity of circumstance, 
some force of ancestral impulse, some tyranny 
of temperament, which will create, if not in eter- 
nal justice, yet in the magnanimity of God, a way 
for their escape from the threatened penalty of 
sin. In some way or other the elastic "If" can 
be made to cover a fair chance of salvation for 
them, whatever may be the luck of worse men. 

Such is the pagan theology on the subject which 
finds currency in the world. Indeed, is it not the 
fact, that, to the majority of us all, crimes are worse 
in other men than in ourselves ? Few men weigh 
themselves with their fellows in even scales. Do 
we not count it an exceptional virtue if a man is 
as severe in self-judgment as in the criticism of 
others ? A subtile breath generally tilts the bal- 
ance in our favor. Here, therefore, lies imminent 
and deadly peril in the preaching of hypothetical 
faith on a truth so appalling to the sensibilities, 
and so overpowering to the self-love, of men, as 
that of an eternal Hell. 

We may perhaps obtain some conception of this 
perilous tendency by extending this hypothetical 
style of teaching to others of the central doctrines 
and duties of our religion. Why not, as perti- 
nently as to this one ? Express in this style the 
doctrine of depravity. If there are beings, such 
as infants, idiots, and some heathen, who, by reason 
of constitutional infirmity or unfortunate condi- 
tions, are not susceptible of moral government, 



162 My Study: and Other Essays. 

such as Christianity represents, then the govern- 
ment of God may not cover them at all in the 
range of its requirements and sanctions. If there 
are men, women, children, who, by reason of their 
amiability of temperament or the innocence of 
youth, are not subject to the disabilities of the 
Fall, then the law of God does not rest upon them 
as being in the bondage of sin. The Word of God 
does not admonish them as lost beings who need 
to be saved. At least this may be true. We 
" must not dogmatize " to the contrary. 

Apply this dubious method of speech to the doc- 
trine of regeneration. If there are men of cul- 
ture, and women of refinement, and children of a 
godly ancestry ; and if to these are to be added 
scholars, philosophers, scientists, statesmen, whom 
a Christian civilization has elevated and rounded 
in the virtues and amenities of life, so that their 
moral deficiencies seem insignificant, their faults 
venial, their sins invisible to the world's eye, — then 
they do not, or may not, stand in need of moral 
renewal by supernatural power. If there are some 
such elect spirits among hearers of the gospel, the 
Christian pulpit can not fairly treat them as dead 
in trespasses and sins. They can not reasonably 
be counted as habitants of a lost world, by nature 
the children of wrath, and needing to be born 
again. They constitute, as many such believe of 
themselves, an intermediate class between saints 
and sinners, of whom the drift of biblical teaching 
seems to take no cognizance. At the best, this 



» The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 163 

may be so. We must submit to a suspense of 
faith till we can prove that it is not so. Preach- 
ing on this doctrine, instead of presenting a solid 
front as the ages of faith have believed, must be 
riven through and through by its exceptions. 

Subject to the same strain of hypothesis the 
doctrine of the Atonement. If there are favored 
classes of the human brotherhood, in which sin 
itself takes on aspiring and beautiful and heroic 
forms, so that they become the theme of eulogium 
and song, which carry the implication that sin in 
such forms does not need to be washed away by 
the atoning blood of Christ, then it follows that 
of such beings Christ is not a Saviour. If there 
are such men and women, the corollary is, that 
they do not depend on the sacrifice of an infinite 
and sinless One to shield them from the wrath 
of an indignant God. Such elect ones are not 
required to look upon themselves as saved by 
grace, and grace only. 

An English nobleman once said, that to him the 
most incredible thing in Christianity was, that, in 
the conditions of salvation, it makes no distinction 
between the noble and the base of human birth. 
Napoleon spoke in the same strain. Said he, "For 
my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation 
which I discover in religion, but the mystery of 
social order which associates with heaven the idea 
of equality." How can the hypothetical theology 
answer him ? It must at least be conceded that 
his objection may be unanswerable. It will not 



164 My Study: and Other Essays. 

do for us to affirm that it is not so. " We must 
not dogmatize." Hypothetical wisdom sets all 
things sailing in a beautiful mist in mid air. 

Carry this style of hypothetical negation into 
the discussion of inspiration. How does it sound 
from a Christian pulpit? Moses, though lifted 
above his age in his religious intuitions, was still 
a Hebrew of the Hebrews. When he, honestly 
perhaps, read prophecy backward, and experi- 
mented upon the age of the world and the order 
of its birth, if he took Hebrew legend for revela- 
tion, and was sadly out in his reckoning; if he 
really knew no more about it than other men who 
had dreams, and saw strange sights ; and if science 
convicts him of that ignorance and presumption, — 
then we must roll up the parchment of Genesis, 
and store it in the library of myths. Our respect 
for Mosaic inspiration must keep it company. 

St. Paul believed, honestly enough, that it was 
given him to see things which it was not lawful 
for man to utter. Yet he was a Jew. He dragged 
behind him the crudities of a race to whom sci- 
ence was unknown, and in whose ethics art was a 
sin. if, therefore, he at one time believed in good 
faith that he saw the end of the world close at 
hand, and said it, and if a month or two later he 
declared in faith not so good that he never said 
that, we must, then, treat him as we would any 
other blundering prophet, in whose reckoning the 
end of the world has not come to time. His 
claim to inspired authority must pass for what 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 165 

it is worth. The popular mind will make quick 
work with it. 

If an inspired Psalmist uttered very worldly 
imprecations ; if he cursed his enemies roundly, 
like other exasperated men j if inspired lawgivers 
commanded things abhorrent to the moral sense 
of mankind; if even our blessed Lord pictured 
retribution in panoramic horrors, which our ethi- 
cal instincts recoil from as contradictory to the 
character of God, — then we must let go the record ' 
of psalmist and lawgiver and of the most godlike 
of teachers. We must hold our notions of inspira- 
tion with so loose a hand, that our own reason 
shall at least be its equal, and our moral intuitions 
vastly its superior. In the ultimate evolution of 
the argument, we must at least concede that this 
may be true. "It will not do for us to dogmatize " 
to the contrary. 

Once more apply this style of hypothesis and 
possible negation to the adjustments of the pulpit 
and the revision of creeds. If Christianity itself 
uplifts some portions of the race, possibly some 
entire generation in a golden age, to such a height 
that culture does for them what grace, and grace 
only, can do for others, then these select ones do 
not, or may not, — we do not know, and dogma- 
tizing is out of place, — may not be proper objects 
of the preaching of the gospel in its ancient types. 
It must be reconstructed to meet their advanced 
thinking. It must be mellowed to suit their deli- 
cate sensibilities. They must not be disgusted 



166 My Study: and Other Essays. 

by its ancient horrors. The sterner elements of it 
must be eliminated. The poet was right who 
sang of a place which " must not be named to ears 
polite." The old creeds must be woven anew of 
more facile stuff. Love must take the precedence 
of Law. Silk must take the place of steel. The 
pulpit of the coming age must be attuned 

" To the Dorian mood 
Of flutes and soft recorders." 

Even now the new dispensation may be at the 
door : who can tell ? 

Ring the changes of these hypothetical nega- 
tions through the whole gamut of revealed truth, 
and what must be the working upon the whole 
tone of the pulpit ? How long could the popular 
faith stand that style of doctrinal discussion? 
How long could any thing stand in the popular 
theology which could deserve a biblical nomen- 
clature ? How long could the faith of the wisest 
and the best of us bear the strain ? A man's real 
faith is the residue which his doubts leave intact. 
Hypothetical beliefs are beliefs suspended. Life 
can not use them as factors in achievement. Char- 
acter can not appropriate them as elements of 
growth. In war, no territory is so severely rav- 
aged as the neutral ground. So is it with beliefs 
which are made the pendants of an " If." 

Why should the doctrine of retribution be sub- 
jected to such neutrality more than the cognate 
doctrines of our religion? No other element in 



The Hypothesis of a Second Probation. 167 

our system of faith bears tampering with so poorly 
as this. The popular mind must hold it with close 
grip, or it can not long hold it at all. It never 
can live subject to the law of chances. Men must 
hear in it the old apostolic ring of unquestioning 
and unqualified speech. Only when we "know 
the terrors of the Lord," can we " persuade men." 
One fact more is conclusive evidence of the 
peril of this way of putting things in our exposi- 
tions of the ancient faith. It is, that its hereditary 
enemies exult in this novel departure. General 
Grant said of the battles of the Wilderness, 
" Where the enemy does not want me, there they 
must find me." The converse principle is perti- 
nent in theological controversy. That is perilous 
to the faith which its enemies delight in. We can 
not afford to preach it in ways which are a boon 
to unbelief. We should be wary of qualifications 
and provisos which ^are welcomed by the whole un- 
believing world. Yet when in the history of the 
New-England Theology has such a greeting been 
given with such loud and general acclaim by its 
opponents as that which has applauded this hypo- 
thetical teaching of a second probation? The 
theological successors of Dr. Channing have joined 
hands with those of Dr. Ballou and of Theodore 
Parker in a triangular benediction upon the dis- 
coverers of this new theory of the future life. It 
is hailed by them all as a sign that the last days 
of the faith of the fathers are at hand. A wise 
man will watch what his enemies say of him. 



168 My Study : and Other Essays. 

Mr. Emerson admits that the Calvinistic theol- 
ogy — mythology, he calls it — has great tenacity 
of life. He says it will be the last to die of the 
ancient beliefs. So it will. But we have only to 
put its massive pillars into the stock and structure 
of hypotheses, to see them topple over before their 
time. Errors develop themselves in systems as 
truths do. As one truth ushers another into the 
general faith, so does one error lead to a system of 
errors in which each one is a prop to the rest. 
One error never stands long alone. Especially in 
the derivation of beliefs from a divine revelation, 
to extort an error from it requires a theory of 
inspiration which undermines the whole. This is 
the result to be feared by the friends, and this is the 
result hoped for by the enemies, of our faith. The 
disintegrating process may be very rapid. An 
innocent hypothesis may in the twinkling of an 
eye be the ruin of a system. 



XIV. 
SCHOLASTIC THEORIES OF INSPIRATION. 

Ours is the religion of a Book. The inspira- 
tion of the Book is, therefore, to the popular faith 
especially, a necessity. No other Christian truth 
reaches so far underground. Yet the drift of 
what may be called scholastic as distinct from 
popular opinion concerning it, in recent years, has 
tended strongly to take the doctrine out of the 
range open to popular inquiry, and to remand it to 
speculations in which only cultured minds, and 
to some extent only professional minds, are inter- 
ested. In some quarters, the result is a change 
amounting almost to revolution. What, then, do 
we need to find in the doctrine of Inspiration to 
make it effective in the theology of the people ? 

First, We need a theory of inspiration which is 
easily understood. A theory packed full of criti- 
cal distinctions and of qualifications not easily 
intelligible, except to educated minds, is not the 
theory needed by the common mind. It will not 
long hold the common mind. It is not a practi- 
cable theory, therefore, for the uses of the pulpit. 
All Christian history shows that the masses of a 
Christianized nation must have the idea of inspira- 

169 



170 My Study: and Other Essays. 

tion, if at all, in clear forms of statement, and 
supported by obvious methods of proof. With 
the people, inspiration is that or nothing. The 
moment that you involve the doctrine in intricate 
forms, or obscure its proof by wary reserve in 
argument which suggests more doubt than faith, 
or suspend its integrity on nice points of criticism 
which invite interminable conflicts of learning, 
you take it out of the range of the moral sym- 
pathies of the people. It slips out of keeping 
with their sense of moral need. They no longer 
see in it a truth which fits in to their condition. 
Men of the common mold will say of such an 
involuted and nicely balanced theory, " That may 
do for men of learning, but it contains no help 
for me." Human nature in the average craves 
another vision. 

We need, also, in a working theory of inspira- 
tion, something which makes the authority of the 
Scriptures imperative. We must have the doc- 
trine in a bold and decisive form. Plain men must 
be able to carry it from the pulpit to their homes, 
and trust it with a sense of assurance in their 
devotional reading of their Bibles. On such a 
subject, men will not long believe a doctrine which 
they can not use. Indeed, it is suspiciously notice- 
able, that even experts in biblical learning are 
sometimes burdened with learning overmuch on 
the subject. They are apt to flounder when they 
attempt to define a very " liberal " and scholastic 
notion of inspiration in few words. They seem 



Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 171 

to be tongue-tied by fear of believing too much. 
One modern expert of this class declares that such 
are the complications and qualifications of the doc- 
trine, that it can not be truthfully stated in exact 
language. That is a disastrous concession to 
infidelity. 

The late Rev. Starr King, D.D., of Boston, once 
illustrated, in his own person, the same peril. He 
had just preached a sermon on the doctrine, which 
was eminent for almost every quality of scholarly 
discourse except those of clear statement and posi- 
tive faith. Among his hearers was his neighbor 
and friend, the late Rev. Nehemiah Adams, D.D. 
As they left the church, arm in arm, Dr. Adams 
said to him, in substance, " Dr. King, your sermon 
leaves me in doubt as to what you mean when you 
call the Bible inspired. Will you explain to me 
wha': j^our idea of inspiration is ? " — "Yes," said 
Dr. King substantially : " I think I have a satis- 
factory notion of it, and it is just this : inspiration 
is — it is — hm ! — it is a kind of mental uplifting ; 
it is an illumination ; it is — well, it is an inspirar 
tion of the whole man." 

This may do for minds like that of Dr. King ; 
but it will never do for the plain Christian believer, 
who feels the need of a revelation from God which 
is authoritatively God-Zi&£. Plain men, when in 
earnest in religious inquiry, incline to believe 
much rather than little. They are, by stress of 
their necessities, believers, not doubters. They 
need a conception of inspiration which shall make 



172 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the Bible resonant with the very voice of God. It 
must be something which the soul can hear in the 
far distance, when conscious of estrangement from 
its Maker. It must give visions of truth which 
men can see in the dark. Nothing less authorita- 
tive than this is the inspiration needed to commend 
the religion of a Book to a lost world. Lost men 
need a voice which can find them. 

A fact supremely vital to the doctrine in ques- 
tion is that proof of any revelation must start with 
the inquiry, "Does man need a revelation?" If 
we need none, the presumption is that we have 
none. This presumption is irrefutable by any 
ulterior reasoning. God is not a God of waste. 
Even Socrates grounded his belief that a teacher 
must comb f^om God, on the simple fact that the 
world was in so h*-d a plight without one. Does 
it not plainly follow, ih^t the theory of inspira- 
tion here combated knocks out from under it the 
initial argument in proof of any revelation ? For 
the only revelation it supports is not the revela- 
tion we need. We need an authority. We need 
an obvious authority, an imperial authority, an 
authority from which there is no appeal. We 
need a clear light shining in a dark place. We 
need something which shall illumine blinded eyes, 
and be audible to deafened ears. A revelation 
which in the very groundwork of its claims multi- 
plies our questionings, and reduplicates our doubts, 
is not the revelation we need. Therefore the pre- 
sumption is conclusive, that it is not the revelation 
we have received. 



Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 173 

Another element needed in a working-theory 
of inspiration, is that it shall be one which shall 
comprehend in its scope the entire Scriptures in 
their moral and religious teachings. 

The assertion that " the Bible contains the Word 
of God " is amphibious. It belongs to two widely- 
diverse realms of thought. It is true, or it is false, 
according to its occult meaning. The Bible is a 
unit. In its unity lies the climax of its purpose 
and its power. That unity can not be broken with 
impunity to the fragments. The whole or nothing 
is the Word of God. A revelation supported by 
intermittent authority, inspired in patches and pa- 
rentheses, we may be very sure is not a revelation, 
either of God or from God. Its structure is not 
Godi-like. Its errors infuse a baleful suspicion 
through its very truths. Whose is the preroga- 
tive to sit in judgment for us, and tell us where 
error ends, and truth begins ? We grope at noon- 
day as in the night. 

The " higher criticism," for instance, in some of 
its vagaries, claims to prove to us that St. Paul 
spoke truth in one epistle, and contradicted it in 
another. What, then, is St. Paul to us, more than 
Swedenborg ? The same wisdom teaches us that 
Moses was inspired to construct the Hebrew juris- 
prudence, but not inspired to record his vision of 
the history of creation. Who, then, is Moses to 
us, more than Confucius? As a historian of the 
divine cosmogony, he is not so much as an expert 
in modern geology. Again, we are instructed that 



174 My Study: and Other Essays. 

our Lord, in giving His sanction to the Jewish 
faith of His day in the Old-Testament Scriptures, 
meant only to lend His authority to the Messianic 
Psalms and a few historic and biographic frag- 
ments, and left the rest to the learned and 
destructive criticism of future times. He is made 
to appear as if His main object in His use of the 
ancient Scriptures were to fend off their imposi- 
tions on modern faith. Is not the sequence inev- 
itable, that the major part of the Old Testament 
to-day, and to us, has no more moral authority 
than the Vedas ? Whether it has as much, what 
means has the unlettered mind of knowing? Such 
a revelation can not live in the trust and the affec- 
tions of common men. It has no place in the 
homes of the people. It must retire to the upper 
shelves of scholastic libraries, or be locked in the 
Vatican behind oaken doors. Sooner or later it 
must go into oblivion with the sacred books of 
other mythologic and obsolete theologies. 

To teach effectively the religion of a Book which 
is progressive in its construction, we must have a 
volume which is one in its system of moral ideas. 
It must be a structure in which every part gravi- 
tates to a center. It must be written by men who 
knew that whereof they affirmed, and who, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, wrote under the direc- 
tion of one controlling Mind. In their religious 
teachings, they must have made no mistakes, and 
not written by guess-work. They must not have 
contradicted each other or themselves. The earlier 



Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 175 

writers must have been forerunners to the later ; 
and, in the end, there must be a fulfillment of 
divine plan which shall throw back a light upon 
the beginning. An epic poem or a tragedy is not 
more truly a structure, compact and one, than we 
have reason to expect a progressive revelation to 
be which shall express to men of all ages the mind 
of God. 

On the other hand, a theory of inspiration, of 
which the final outcome is that Moses contradicted 
Christ, that the imprecations of David conflict 
with the Epistles of St. John, and that St. Paul 
could not even repeat himself correctly, abrogates 
all claim of the Scriptures to imperative and 
divine authority. God has not thus contradicted 
God. He has not given to such a world as this a 
volume through which runs no golden thread of 
truth unbroken. That He has given to a lost 
world a book inspired here, and not inspired there, 
historic now, and mythic then, blundering some- 
times, and by hap right at other times, and that 
He has left it to man's infirm intuitions to divine 
w T hether it is oracular anywhere, is absurd. It is 
not like God to build such a rickety structure. 

Nor is it like man to interpret such a volume 
truthfully. The uncultured mind especially can 
not solve the riddle of such a book. The princi- 
ples of its interpretation are too recondite, and 
the result too dubious. Under the intellectual 
infirmities induced by sin, man can not by any 
skill in mental ricochet pick out the inspired frag- 



176 My Study: and Other Essays. 

ments from such a medley of fable. Whatever 
may be true of the cultured few, the many would 
flounder through its pages as in a quagmire. 
What else could the vast majority of men do with 
it, but to give it up, — some in contempt, and 
some in despair? Socrates, when he prayed that 
a teacher might be sent from God, craved no such 
revelation as this. In all soberness, would not 
Cicero be as valuable a teacher of immortality? 
Would not Marcus Aurelius be a better guide to 
a manly philosophic life ? The book of Nature 
surely would be infinitely superior to such a Book 
of God. 

The views here advanced are further enforced 
by another fact. It is, that we need in our theory 
of inspiration to find an adaptation to men who 
are undergoing the discipline of probation. One 
thing seems to be often strangely overlooked in 
discussions of this and kindred doctrines. It is, 
that man here is in no ideal world. Life is too 
severe a strain upon his physical and moral nature 
to leave him mental force enough to settle for 
himself the interminable questions to which scho- 
lastic theories of such doctrines give rise. We 
need in such a life a revelation from God and of 
God which shall speak its own authority. That 
authority must be such that ignorant men can be 
made to understand it. Men not trained in schools 
must be able to see the reason for it. Men bur- 
dened by life's discipline must be able to take it 
home to life's emergencies. 



Scholastic Theories of Inspiration. 177 

The argument for the evidences of Christianity, 
which has for ages commanded the faith of believ- 
ers, is mainly that derived from the response of 
the Christian heart to the Bible as a revelation 
from God. We believe it because it is such a 
revelation as we need, and such as it is like God 
to give. We have thus claimed that the Bible 
does speak for itself. The unlettered mind has 
credible evidence of its divinity, without harassing 
itself with the scholastic side of the proof. This 
evidence we can not afford to surrender. Yet we 
are in danger of losing it in the complications 
of criticism on the subject of inspiration, which 
suggest more qualifications than principles, more 
exceptions than rules. We need the doctrine, its 
statement and its proofs, in such forms as shall 
commend both to common men in common life. 

In the shock of overwhelming sorrows, when 
men's need is sorest, and their mental force ex- 
hausted, they must be able to find God everywhere 
present in the Book, without the drawback of mis- 
givings, lest it be mistaken here, and fabulous 
there, and perhaps absolute nowhere. Sick men 
must be competent to find comfort in it, and 
tempted men to find strength, and dying men 
peace, without abatement by reason of doubts of 
its authority. 

All these uses of the Book are impracticable to 
the extreme of absurdity, if the best and only 
revelation we have is one which has for its chief 
aim to put us on treble guard against believing too 



178 My Study: and Other Essays. 

much. We are in no condition to be so morbidly- 
shy of faith. We are in a wretched plight indeed, 
if our only medium of converse with God plunges 
us all into the vortex of scholasticism, and leaves 
us there, to find out by our own distempered vision 
what inspiration is, and where it is, and how much 
it covers with authority, and how much with doubt, 
and how it gets along with its own inconsistencies 
and blunders. Of all men most miserable are we, 
if, in response to our despairing cry for help, God 
has given us a revelation, in which, when we sum 
up the whole of it, and cast the balance of its 
teachings, we must find more to reject than to 
believe, more to foster doubt than faith, more 
to start new despairs than to relieve old ones. 
Such a revelation, be it repeated, is not the revela- 
tion which a lost world needs. Therefore the 
presumption is beyond rebuttal, that such is not 
the revelation we have received. 



XV. 

THE NEW-ENGLAND CLERGY AND THE ANTI- 
SLAVERY REFORM. 

PAET I. 

In every great revolution of opinion, three classes 
of men are the chief belligerents. They are the 
resistants, the destructives, and the reformers. 
The resistants are the men who hold on to things 
as they are. They resist change because it is 
change. The destructives are the men who would 
break up society itself to get rid of its abuses. 
They are the men of one idea. The reformers 
are men of balanced ideas who look before and 
after. They are tolerant of evils which are curing 
themselves. They labor patiently for bloodless 
revolutions. 

With these distinctions in mind, it is not dif- 
ficult to classify the men who were eminent in the 
war of antislavery opinion, thirty to fifty years 
ago. The proslavery men were resistants. They 
resisted, not only the liberty of the black man, but 
almost every thing else which a free people value. 
Free speech, a free press, a free postal-service, free 
soil, free pulpits, free schools, they resisted as 

179 



180 My Study: and Other Essays. 

stoutly as free negroes. The very word c * free " 
was a bugbear to their fancy in the daytime, and 
a nightmare to their dreams. 

The Abolitionists, technically so called, were 
destructives. They were honest, outspoken men, 
who made no secret of their aim to destroy the 
Union of these States. The national Constitution, 
in their amiable dialect, was a " covenant with 
hell." Their code of ethics was sublimely simple 
and compact. They saw no difference between an 
individual and an organic wrong. Wrong was 
wrong. That was the end of argument. What 
was left to argue about? A wrong interlaced 
with, and grown under, the traditions, the usages, 
the laws, the institutions, and the wills of thirty 
millions of independent minds, must be treated as 
if it were the whim of one. A wrong inherited 
centuries ago was to be no more patiently dealt 
with than a wrong enacted yesterday. They there- 
fore trusted nothing to the slow foot of time. 
Institutions which had taken ages in the building, 
must be revolutionized in a night. Their theory 
took the whole subject of American slavery out of 
the domain of practical statesmanship, and con- 
signed it to the conscience of a child. 

As in all other developments of fanatical reform, 
a vein of malign passion ran side by side with 
much that was noble through their theories and 
policies and speech. In debate, their habit was 
abusive as opposed to suasive. The singleness of 
their aim gave them the power which all earnest 



New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 181 

men have, who are not trammeled by qualified 
convictions. The opinions of most men are prob- 
abilities. Theirs were certainties, absolute in evi- 
dence, and imperial in authority. They were 
passionate thinkers, who talked right on, and acted 
as they talked. 

So much as this must be admitted for them : they 
had a sylvan robustness of thought which impelled 
them to say what they meant, and to go straight 
to their objects. If they had talked less about 
their honesty of purpose, and truth of speech, one 
would give them credit for more of both. But, 
in the main, they were loyal to their thought. 
They believed in themselves, and trusted their own 
intuitions against the world. It would be a libel 
to question their sincerity. 

It is not a libel to say that the intensity of their 
convictions on the slavery question was not all the 
intensity of conscience. It was, in part, the fury 
of dissent. Conscientious men are apt to be tem- 
pestuously conscientious if they have something 
to hate. George Ripley, the accomplished presi- 
dent of the "Brook Farm," said of one of that 
eccentric household, " He would hoe corn all day, 
Sunday, if I would let him ; but all Massachusetts 
could not make him do it on Monday." The con- 
science of reform has a double nature. One-half 
of it is the iconoclasm of dissent. So it was with 
the leaders of abolitionism in New England. 

It was in keeping with their temper, that they 
should avowedly, and on principle, fling the chief 



182 My Study: and Other Essays. 

weight of their cause upon the power of invective. 
Argument was secondary, because conclusions were 
foregone. They made a study of denunciation as 
of a fine art. A new epithet of vituperation, or 
figure of objurgatory speech, was to their dialect 
like a new rifle to an arsenal. The author deserved 
a patent for it. When Mr. Garrison had hatched 
overnight, in his inventive brain, a new lampoon 
upon the American Church, Marlborough Chapel 
resounded with it the next morning. He orated 
with beaming smile about the Church as " the 
spawn of hell." Then the few scores of listeners 
on the floor were titillated in sympathy. 

Those were rare days for studying the art of 
eloquence in its failures. Probably history does 
not contain an example of another body of men, 
possessed of a fair average of brains, and some of 
them of culture, and led by one man who belonged 
to the supreme rank of modern rhetoricians rather 
than orators (for orators win their audiences : 
Wendell Phillips seldom did), who on the platform 
practiced so little tact in dealing with men, or who 
threshed the mother tongue so ferociously in the 
dialect of abuse. They were destructives in their 
theories of government ; they were destructives in 
their measures of policy ; they were destructives 
in their judgments of institutions and of public 
men; they were destructives in their style of 
debate. 

Their magnetism drew into alliance with them, 
as that of such men always does, sympathetic de- 



New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 183 

structives of every stripe and color. To a looker- 
on, it seemed as if all the " cranks " on the conti- 
nent were drawn in invisible grooves to the plat- 
form of abolition. Divorced women could talk 
there of the tyranny of the marriage laws ; beard- 
less boys could expose there the blunders of Moses 
and the barbarism of the Old Testament ; social- 
ists could expound there the inhumanity of prop- 
erty in land ; laborers on a strike could denounce 
there the despotism of capital; " Come-outers " 
could recite there in sing-song the corruption of 
the Church ; and " Father Lampson," a harmless 
lunatic, who, with his snath bereft of blade, per- 
sonated "Old Time," could denounce there the 
crimes of Scribes and Pharisees. In short, every 
bee in everybody's bonnet had a chance to hum 
there. If a long-haired man had a revelation from 
heaven against the sin of short hair, and a short- 
haired woman had her dispatch against the crime 
of long hair, both could join hands there lovingly, 
and have their say out. This is a caricature, but 
it is a caricature of real life. 

That it is so, is confirmed by a description given 
by Ralph Waldo Emerson of a similar assemblage, 
of which he was himself a member, in which fig- 
ured the majority of those who were leaders in 
those days of the antislavery reform. He says, 
"If the assembly was disorderly, it was pictur- 
esque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, 
Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, 
Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Aboli- 



184 My Study: and Other Essays. 

tionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, 
— all came successively to the top." 

The " picturesqueness " of the abolitionist as- 
semblies reminded a spectator of Edmund Burke's 
celebrated caricature of Lord Chatham's coalition 
ministry. " He made an administration so check- 
ered and speckled, a piece of joinery so crossly 
indented and whimsically dovetailed, such a tes- 
sellated pavement without cement, here a bit of 
black stone, and there a bit of white, patriots and 
courtiers, Whigs and Tories, who had never spoken 
to each other in their lives until they found them- 
selves, they knew not how, pigging together in the 
same truckle-bed." 

To a good-natured looker-on, who had strolled 
in on a May morning, — a country parson, perhaps, 
who sought recreation in hearing himself casti- 
gated, and in finding out what a crimsoned sinner 
he was, — there were two redeeming features of 
the show. One was the bland, fatherly smile 
of William Lloyd Garrison in the chair. He was 
at heart a benignant man ; and his look seemed to 
overflow with the oil of human kindness, at the 
very moment when his speech was as the oil of 
vitriol. Like Isaak Walton's angler, he hooked 
his worm " as if he loved it." The good of that 
to the worm was not so obvious, but that was the 
way of it. The other was the grand and stirring 
songs of the "Hutchinson Family." They were 
the bugle-call of freedom. For downright anti- 
slavery effect, they were worth all the rest put 



New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 185 

together. They made one's heart swell with sym- 
pathy for the slave till it was big enough to lift 
the roof off. The philippic from the platform 
went in at one ear, and out at the other. The 
song lived in one's soul for many a day. 

Between these two extremes in the conflict of 
the century stood the genuine reformers. These 
constituted the great bulk of the thinking minds 
of the North who gave to the subject reflection 
enough to have serious convictions about it. In 
this immense intermediate class stood the vast 
majority of the clergy — well, for the want of a 
more exact dividing-line, we will say — north of 
a line running zigzag westward from New-York 
City, and following northward the Atlantic coast. 
And foremost of these were the clergy of New 
England. 

Mr. Webster never uttered a truer word than 
when he told the Senate of the United States that 
hostility to slavery was born in the religion of his 
constituents. It was their ancestral birthright. 
They drank it in with their mother's milk. They 
breathed it in the atmosphere of their Sunday 
schools and their family prayers. They were 
taught it in the thoughtful sermons of their pul- 
pits, and in the masterly decisions of their courts. 
They sang it on Thanksgiving and Fast Days, and 
in the ballads of the farm and the workshop. 
Even the doggerel of " Yankee Doodle," by its 
associations with Independence Day and Bunker 
Hill, had become their festal song of liberty. No 



186 My Study: and Other Essays. 

power of suasion or of force could change the 
convictions of such a people. President Lincoln 
spoke the intuition of the New-England mind from 
its cradle when he said, " If slavery is not wrong, 
nothing is wrong." So believed, and on that belief 
acted, the churches and clergy of these Eastern 
States. 

There were exceptions. But these owed their 
notoriety chiefly to the paucity of their numbers, 
to the contrast of their opinions with the back- 
ground of public sentiment, and to the fact that 
they had no perceptible influence on the general 
mind. Outside of the Episcopal Church, we can 
not recall a dozen names in the entire clergy of 
New England, of men eminent in position and in 
character, who held proslavery views. We may 
safely venture the guess, that more than half of 
the dozen, if they could be found, would have 
pocketed in silence the " Fugitive-slave Law," if 
a hunted negro had come to them at midnight, 
begging for food and a hiding-place. One of the 
curious psychological phenomena of those times 
was, that good men could be proslavery in theory, 
yet antislavery at heart. The Rev. Nehemiah 
Adams, D.D., the author of " The South Side 
View," never could understand why men called 
him an advocate of slavery. He considered him- 
self as honest an antislavery man as any of us. 
So true is it that 

" Man sees not what he seems to see : 
He seems not what he is.'i 



New -England Clergy and Antislavery. 187 

The political opinions of that small group of 
clergymen carried no weight with the rank and 
file of the New-England churches. The Rev. Dr. 
Lord of Hanover, president of Dartmouth College, 
was one of the few Northern preachers who found 
in the Bible the enslavement of the black man as 
the law of the ages. This theory he honestly 
advocated for thirty years. It was one of a group 
of pessimistic notions which he elaborated with 
great learning and ingenuity. He backed them 
up by a .personal character of unquestioned force 
and rare purity. Yet near the end of his life, 
when he came to record his farewell message to 
the world, he confessed that his thirty years of 
faithful teaching had not resulted, so far as he 
knew, in the conversion to his views of a single 
mind outside of his own kindred. 

So it was everywhere. Proslavery opinions 
fell stillborn from the New-England press. They 
found unresponsive or indignant hearers from 
New-England pulpits. The pulpits were few that 
ventured to proclaim them. As to other litera- 
ture, where on the broad earth is there a pro- 
slavery poem or drama or history, or so much as 
a ballad fit to be sung by a milkmaid ? The world 
sings liberty, never servitude. 

A story went the round of ecclesiastical gossip 
in those days, which illustrates the popular esti- 
mate of the intellectual force which gravitated 
into the antislavery ranks among the clergy. 
Two parishioners in a metropolitan congregation 



188 My Study: and Other Essays. 

were discussing the merits of a certain candidate 
for their vacant pulpit. They were resistants in 
their politics. Said one, respecting the popular 
candidate, " I don't want him : I am told that he 
is an abolitionist." — "Well," said his friend in 
reply, "I have made up my mind, that in these 
times we have got to have an abolitionist or a 
fool." To men of that stripe, all antislavery min- 
isters were abolitionists. The story loses some- 
what of its piquancy by the expurgation of certain 
expletives which were in the original. But it illus- 
trates where the popular judgment looked to find 
the men of weight in the clerical profession. The 
candidate was Rev. Dr. Stone of the Park-street 
Church, Boston. 

It must be conceded that the Christian senti- 
ment of reform at that time varied greatly in 
intensity. Some men were at tropic heat, others 
in a cooler zone. Good men differed in their pol- 
icies. They were not agreed as to the limits of 
Northern responsibility for Southern wrong. Espe- 
cially, they were not at one respecting the duty of 
benevolent societies, chartered and holding funds 
for other purposes, to bear public testimony against 
the national sin. We have no word of apology to 
utter for those adroit societies whose mission under 
their charter laid upon them the duty of speech, 
and whose diplomatic voice was silent. Silence, 
then, was more than speech : it was connivance at 
wrong. Let it receive from impartial history the 
verdict it deserves ! No word of ours shall gloss 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 189 

or lighten it. But what we claim is this, — that 
those differences were but surface-currents. Like 
other surface-currents, they took on at the time 
the look and the dignity of the tides; but they 
were not the tides. They never represented the 
great deeps of New-England thought. 

Looking back to those times, now that the long 
agony is over, it is easy to see that God was moving 
more rapidly than men were. He was moving in 
the whirlwind, we in the evening zephyr. We can 
see now, that had we all felt more intensely, and 
spoken more imperatively, and acted more aggres- 
sively, we still should not have kept pace with the 
swift-footed angel of revolution. 

But the fact, vital to the present purpose, is that 
the great undercurrent of Christian opinion was 
moving in only one way. The great deeps were 
agitated to but one purpose. They massed them- 
selves as with the volume of the sea against the 
great national crime. They were crowding it 
steadily to its doom. If the movement did not 
equal in velocity that of the providence of God, 
still it was in profound sympathy with that. 

Moreover, it represented, on the ethical side of 
the conflict, the only movement which was so 
grounded in temperate opinions, and conducted by 
practical wisdom, as to encourage hope of accom- 
plishing any thing but the horrors of civil war. 
The religious mind of New England was a sub- 
stantial unit in its aim at a peaceful abolition of 
slavery. Its convictions were outspoken, and fore- 



190 My Study: and Other Essays. 

most in their expression were the New-England 
ministry. The charge which is now sometimes 
made, either in ignorance or in malice, that the 
New-England pulpit was craven and time-serving 
on the subject, is libelous. Nobody who knows 
those times well, really believes it. It is worthy 
only of that acrid class of minds who are best 
known as "minister-haters." 

We find proof of the position here claimed for 
our clergy in the volumes upon volumes of Fast 
Day and Thanksgiving sermons which accumu- 
lated all through that half-century. Confirmatory 
evidence appears in the records of our ecclesiasti- 
cal associations. Those, year after year, bore sol- 
emn testimony against the crime which threatened 
the life of the Republic. Then, as the conflict 
deepened, and to him whose ear was near the 
underground of society the roar of artillery boomed 
from the near future, we see three thousand and 
fifty of the clergy of New England, led, I believe, 
by the reverend editor of "The Congregational- 
ist," entering their protest as ministers of God 
against the iniquity before the United-States Sen- 
ate. That protest would have had the names of 
nine-tenths of the New-England ministry, if there 
had been time to collect them. 

The significance of that testimony may be meas- 
ured by the wrath with which it was resented. 
Senator Douglas was astute enough to see in it 
the most fatal single blow which had been struck 
at slavery in his day. He was a son of Vermont. 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 191 

He knew that back of that protest stood, in solid 
phalanx, the Christian mind of these Eastern 
States. He knew, too, that that was a power 
which had never failed to make its words felt in 
deeds in crises of the nation's destiny. He heard 
in it the prophecy of doom. His own political 
aspirations, founded on the extension of slavery, 
were fated from that hour, even if a more grim 
and imperative fate had not been creeping upon 
him. Hence arose the incontrollable ire with 
which he greeted the expostulation of the New- 
England pulpit. 

If further proof were needed, it is forthcoming 
in the almost universal tone of the religious press. 
With the exception of one sect, small in numbers, 
whose temperament and traditions held it aloof 
from all reforms, our periodical press spoke almost 
as with the voice of one man. It varied as the 
people did in intensity of utterance, but in sub- 
stantial meaning that utterance was one. The 
trumpet gave one prolonged blast of warning. 

These tokens of the Christian sentiment of New 
England do not admit of question. They have 
gone into history. They are graven in the rock 
for ever. As Mr. Webster said to Gen. Hayne of 
the national fame of Massachusetts, so say we 
of all New England : " There is her history. The 
world knows it by heart." And we claim, that in 
the forefront of the warfare of antislavery opin- 
ion, which this group of States conducted, stood 
our churches and their ministry. 



192 My Study: and Other Essays. 

We claim for them more than this. We claim, 
that, if they had been let alone, they would have 
been successful. Turn back a hundred years. 
Look at the public sentiment of Virginia at that 
time. Read the deliverances of Jefferson, of Pat- 
rick Henry, of James Madison, of George Wyeth, 
— indeed, of all the public men of the Old Domin- 
ion. Mark their abhorrence of the policy which 
threatened to make Virginia a slave-breeding State. 
Note the social degradation of the men who con- 
ducted the domestic slave-trade. Observe the 
unanimous voice of the pulpit against the break- 
ing-up of negro families by sale. One can not 
recall these signs of the drift of public opinion, 
without discerning that Virginia was on the verge 
of peaceful emancipation. Every thing leaned that 
way. And, as the social forces of the Republic 
were then poised, as went Virginia, so went all the 
rest of the slave States. That was fore-ordained. 

Now, we claim, that starting with that drift of 
public sentiment in the Old Dominion, and with 
the prestige which that State had in the politics 
of the country, if the great alliances of Christian 
faith had been left to work in their normal way, 
unhampered by the inflammatory policies of the 
extremists on either side, and specially by those 
which at the North soon succeeded in identifying 
antislavery with infidelity, slavery would have 
succumbed to moral power. To doubt it, is to 
doubt all Christian history. The negro would 
have come up to the rights of liberty, as he grew 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 193 

up to the duties of liberty. He would not have 
been exploded from the cannon's mouth into the 
miserable fiction of it which he has to-day, in 
which he has neither the intelligence to prize, nor 
the power to use, a freeman's ballot. Every decade 
adds to the proof, that our ministry, and those 
w^ho thought with them, were right in their faith 
that liberty grows : it never sails into the sulphu- 
rous air on the wings of dynamite. 

This nation, in the first century of its existence, 
had the grandest opportunity that nation ever had, 
of putting to the proof the power of Christianity 
to extirpate a great national wrong, without stroke 
of sword, or beat of drum — and we flung it to 
the winds ! In the forefront of the hosts who 
committed the awful sacrilege, we charge that 
there stood the " fire-eaters " of the South and the 
abolitionists of New England. On their heads 
rests the responsibility for the civil war, and the 
outpouring of the life-blood of five hundred thou- 
sand men ! Such is the verdict which history 
will render in the coming ages, when the world 
has become used to the righting of organic wrongs 
by bloodless revolutions. 



XVI. 

THE NEW-ENGLAND CLERGY AND THE ANTI- 
SLAVERY REFORM. 

PART II. 

What were the causes which created mutual 
repulsion between those who, in a former article, 
.have been termed the reformers and the destruc- 
tives in the antislavery controversy? The story 
is soon told. 

1. The reformers believed, as the destructives 
did not, in the rectitude of tolerating organic evils 
till a Christian civilization had an opportunity to 
undermine them. They had great faith in the 
reformatory force of truth, working slowly and 
underground. They accepted, with amendments, 
the Mosaic economy in dealing with human servi- 
tude. They did not believe that the world had 
outgrown it. Their religion had, in other ages 
and countries, uprooted barbarisms more inveter- 
ate than that of American slavery. It had done 
this, not by tempestuous and bloody assault, but 
on the Mosaic principle, by silent and gradual 
undermining. They believed that it could do the 
same again. It might act with labyrinthal intri- 

194 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 195 

cacy of movement, but with exactest clockwork, 
which would never go back on its ow T n advances. 

They accepted it, therefore, as one of the politi- 
cal principles, wrapped up in the very life of Chris- 
tianity, that sanguinary revolutions and " reigns 
of terror " are not the normal method of organic 
changes in social order. On this principle they 
acted. They conceived that they had no right to 
effect the destruction of the wrong which threat- 
ened the nation's life by the convulsions of civil 
war. They had no right to prevent death in one 
way by inflicting death in another. What for, 
they asked in homespun Saxon, should they do 
that thing ? If, in the purposes of God, such was 
to be the permitted manner of the end, the bolt 
must be forged and hurled by other hands than 
theirs. They would meet their solemn duty in 
the tragedy if it came, when it came ; but it was 
not theirs to create the duty, nor to inflict the 
tragedy. Theirs was a mission of peace. 

We confidently ask what other position could 
they hold, as preachers of Christianity ? Our reli- 
gion, from the beginning, in its relation to political 
reforms, has been a power of peaceful revolution. 
As related to African servitude, it was that or 
nothing. Its ordained ministers could do no 
otherwise than to choose a policy which would 
not set rivers of blood to flowing. Were they 
sinners above all other men for this? Had this 
been the only cause of repulsion between the two 
wings of reform, it would have been imperative. 



196 My Study: and Other Essays. 

2. But it was not the only cause. The reformers 
believed, as the destructives did not, that slavery- 
could be abolished without sundering the union 
of the States. The dissolution of the union was 
the avowed object of agitation by the destructives. 
This was their supreme aim. Till it was achieved, 
nothing was achieved. The Union, like the 
Church, was a " fraternity of man-stealers " and a 
"band of thugs." No honest man could parti- 
cipate in it for an hour. Wendell Phillips could 
not vote for a deputy sheriff in Boston, so long as 
a bedridden slave was fed by his owner in Texas. 
For forty years he and his colleagues lived for the 
disruption of the republic. 

The reformers denied both the premise and the 
conclusion. To the clergy of New England, espe- 
cially, this republic was a sacred thing. They saw 
in it, not the work of man. The hand of God 
was in it from the beginning. Their godly an- 
cestry had founded it in prayer. They had a 
religious faith about it which took in the destinies 
of the world within its range. The liberty and re- 
demption of all mankind were suspended upon 
its perpetuity. 

This conception of the mission of these States 
they had inherited from the colonial and revolu- 
tionary times. Says John Adams, " I always con- 
sider the settlement of America with reverence 
and wonder as the opening of a grand scene and 
design of Providence for the illumination of the 
ignorant and the emancipation of mankind all 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 197 

over the earth." John Adams obtained that idea 
from the clergy of his time. The pulpit then was 
full of it. From thence it came down to the pul- 
pit of the period we are reviewing. To the min- 
istry of that period, it was a relic of a more than 
heroic age. It was never forgotten at their 
Thanksgiving festivals ; they were wont to pray 
for the Union and the bondman in the same breath. 
Such was their politico-religious creed. They be- 
lieved it with heart and soul. What for, they 
asked, after these years of fidelity to it as a sacred 
trust, should they be faithless to the republic now ? 
Had there been no other reason for the antagonism 
of the two antislavery forces, this alone would 
have driven them apart. 

3. But there was another reason. The reform- 
ers believed, as the destructives did not, in the 
efficacy of the suasive as opposed to the abusive 
policy in debate. The ascendency, almost the 
monopoly, given by the destructives to invective 
in the controversy, was offensive to the good taste, 
and revolting to the good sense, of the reformers. 

The great bulk of any large, and specially an 
educated, body of public men is made up of men 
of robust sense. The ministry of New England 
were men of that stamp. They were not im- 
beciles, and they were not savages in controversy. 
They could see no reason for exempting slavery 
from the laws of courteous and honorable discus- 
sion. To make the exemption was a confession. 
It confessed that their cause could not stand the 



198 My Study: and Other Essays. 

test of the manly modes in which thinking men 
were accustomed to deal with thinking men. 
Frantic vituperation in a great national debate 
is a sign of conscious weakness or of conscious 
wrong. 

The principle of the destructives in this thing 
was criminal; if not criminal, it was ungentle- 
manly ; if not ungentlemanly, it was silly ; if not 
silly, it was insane. The policy of agitation 
founded on it was not worthy of bearded men. 
It was the eccentricity of a common scold. States- 
men at the head of sovereign republics, and hard- 
knuckled men at the polls, could not be expected 
to yield their convictions, and change their votes, 
for a deluge of clapperclaw. It was but a truism 
of common sense, that self-respecting men any- 
where would not tolerate such methods of ap- 
proach. The abolitionists themselves never would 
have done it. The reformers would not do it. 
Nobody would do it. Nothing but fanatical pas- 
sion could make such an exorbitant demand on 
human nature. In asserting that demand, fanati- 
cal passion was puerile. 

As practical men, therefore, the reformers de- 
nounced the policy of invective as one which, 
seconded by that of the resistants at the opposite 
extreme, blocked up every avenue to emancipation 
except the via mala of civil war. Thus they looked 
at it as a question of policy. Looking at it as a 
question of principle, they could not help seeing, 
that to suspend on such a policy the success of a 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 199 

great humanitarian revolution, and the peace of 
a great nation, and the liberty of a great race, was 
a crime against the civilization of the world. 
Looking now at the grim history of the end, who 
was right ? 

In any aspect of the case, the vituperative fero- 
city of the destructives could not fail to repel from 
them the tastes and the convictions and the good 
sense of an educated and dispassionate clergy. As 
gentlemen, as wise men, as patriotic men, as Chris- 
tian men, they could not seek such an alliance. 
What for, they asked again, shall we do this great 
folly? The two wings of antislavery sentiment 
must have parted asunder for this cause alone, even 
if there were none more sacred. 

4. But there was a cause more sacred. The 
reformers believed, as many of the destructives 
did not, in the inspiration of the Old Testament 
and the divine origin of the Christian Church. It 
has been the misfortune of the cause of liberty, 
the world over, to attract to its support men who 
have been more hostile to Christianity than to 
tyranny. Such was the fate of American anti- 
slavery as represented by the abolitionist wing in 
the controversy. 

The abolitionists welcomed to their fellowship, 
and in part to their leadership, men and women 
whose chief resources in debate were denuncia- 
tions of the Mosaic institutions and the teachings 
of St. Paul. Some of them were expert in their 
flings at Him whose name is above every name. 



200 My Study: and Other Essays. 

They shocked our most sacred sensibilities. They 
travestied our supreme hopes for ourselves and for 
the world. 

Not all of the abolitionists were of this character. 
William Jay was not : Arthur and Lewis Tappan 
were not. Indeed, a marked distinction grew up 
between the abolitionist platform of Boston and 
that of New York — the latter being much less 
given to outrage of Christian convictions. Long 
before the war, the distinction grew to alienation. 
The Tappans, William G. Burney, the " Free-soil " 
candidate for the Presidency of the United States, 
and others of that ilk, could not work with the 
leaders of the Boston platform any more genially 
than the New-England clergy could. Each wing 
had its separate organ. " The Emancipator " and 
" The Liberator " represented policies as wide 
apart almost as the poles. 

But geographical locality compelled the New- 
England clergy to deal chiefly with the abolition- 
ists of Boston, not with those of New York. In 
Massachusetts they encountered the anti-Christian 
type of abolitionism, in its most virulent form. It 
infected weak ones in our churches. Under the 
advice of its apostles, they were enticed into faith- 
lessness to their Christian vows. We were com- 
pelled to perform a duty which is the most painful 
one devolving on a Christian pastor, — to subject 
to discipline men of whose conscientiousness we 
had no more doubt than of our own. We must 
do it, or officially connive at treachery to our sacred 
Scriptures and the ordinances of Christ. 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 201 

The collision concerned no question of abstract 
dogma. If it had, our duty might have been the 
same. But it did not. It came home to us in the 
most hallowed duties of Christian fellowship. We 
felt the shock of it in our assemblies for social 
prayer and at the Lord's Supper. We were in- 
truded upon by some of the leaders of the reform, 
who came into our meetings to tempt away from 
us beloved members of our churches. Tracts ca- 
lumniating the Bible and the Church were put into 
the hands of our children, and circulated in our 
Sunday schools. What could we do ? Should we 
have sat idle ? Should we have taken the intruders 
by the hand, and bade them God-speed ? We did 
not so read our commission from our Lord. 

Yet it is due to honest history to say that 
Wendell Phillips was not understood to approve 
the antislavery assaults upon the Scriptures. The 
clergy had no more bitter foe than he ; but of the 
Word of God, he was said to be a reverent believer. 
Doubtless there were many others less eminent 
among the abolitionists of New England who 
agreed with him in that respect. 

But we were not tempted to trust him as a 
Christian leader of a great reform, nor was our 
respect for him as a Christian man increased by 
such occurrences as the following. On a memor- 
able occasion, he was indulging in his usual tirade 
against men and institutions and States in general. 
Massachusetts came in for her full share of his 
abuse. He took up the formula which the mem- 



202 My Study: and Other Essays. 

ory of the fathers ought to have made sacred on 
his lips, " God save the Commonwealth of Massa- 
chusetts ! " By interpolating the most vulgar of 
the profane words which one hears in the slums 
of Boston, he transmuted it into an execration of 
his native State. We did not follow him as a 
model, either in religion or good taste. Ought we 
to have done so ? Should the reverend clergy of 
Boston have imitated him in their next reading 
of the governor's proclamation of a day of thanks- 
giving ? We did not so interpret our ordination 
vows. 

Men whose tastes craved such things, and whose 
religion approved them, were numerous enough on 
the platform of abolition in New England, to give 
coloring to the policy represented there. To this 
day, all over the South, the name of "abolitionist" 
is the synonym of every most virulent type of infi- 
del and scoffer. A reform, like a man, is known 
by the company it keeps. 

The clergy could not join hands with such men 
without treachery to Christ. They could not form 
alliance with even the nobler class of the destruc- 
tives without lending the sanctity of their profes- 
sion to the moral support of other men, whom they 
believed to be enemies of their Lord. They were 
but human if they felt on personal grounds, also, 
that it was an insult to ask it of them. Whatever 
other men might think of them, they respected 
themselves. They revered their calling. When 
men came to them, seeking their fellowship, and, 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 203 

at the same time, branding the Church of Christ 
as the " brotherhood of thieves," and the " spawn 
of hell," humility was not just then the chief of 
their graces. It would have been a dishonor to 
them if it had been. There is a great deal of 
human nature in Christian ministers, and well is 
it for them and for truth that it is so. 

But, in the historical juncture now under review, 
necessity laid an embargo on their fellowship with 
the destructives. There was no common ground 
on which men who believed first in Christianity, 
and then in civil liberty, could even carry on dis- 
cussion very freely with men who believed first in 
civil liberty, and in Christianity not at all, and 
whose destructive appetite was so voracious for 
sacred things. Two or three fragments of history 
will give a picture of the times. After the lapse 
of thirty years, I claim for them, not a literal, but 
a substantial, accuracy. If they err, it is rather 
within than beyond the truth. 

Once upon a time we made respectful mention 
of Moses, as authority for the toleration of organic 
wrongs. The only reply we got was, " 80 much 
the worse for Moses, then." Again, we reverently 
quoted St. Paul, in proof of exceptional cases in 
which the legal ownership of a slave might not be 
the "sum of all villanies." The rejoinder was 
flung contemptuously in our faces, " Who, pray, is 
St. Paul ? " We were innocent enough to recall 
with reverence the words of our Lord, "I have 
many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear 



204 My Study: and Other Essays. 

them now;" and we were about to ask whether 
the principle of reserve of truth, in consideration 
of the infirmities of men, might not possibly admit 
of a broader application. But the autocrat of the 
platform thundered in reply, "Reserve of truth 
about slavery, by God or man, is the policy of 
hell." Once more we ventured to cite the silence 
of the Master upon Roman slavery, as possibly 
instructive to later times. But, before we had 
finished our story, the war-whoop came back, " If 
Jesus Christ was tolerant of slavery, then down 
with. Jesus Christ ! " And — could it be that we 
heard aright? — the voice was the voice of a 
woman ! 

What could we do ? The hypothetical gauze of 
such flings at the person and teachings of our Lord 
could not conceal their venom. They were blas- 
phemy to our ears. They made the whole at- 
mosphere sulphurous. Reverent believers in the 
Scriptures would have been recreant to their faith 
if they had entered into alliance with men who so 
maligned the name of Jesus. We could not lift 
them to our level of thinking ; and we would not, 
if we could, descend to theirs. What for, we 
asked again, should we commit such sacrilege? 

5. Added to these causes of alienation between 
the abolitionists and the clergy was another. It 
was not good policy for the religious men of New 
England to act in alliance with the extremists, 
even if on other grounds it had been possible. 
Bear with the word " policy " a moment. Prac- 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 205 

tical men in a great reform aim at practical results. 
They are not content with blurting out their say. 
They aim so to put things with such alliances of 
auxiliary opinion as to gain their object. They 
seek to allay prejudices, to convince opponents, to 
win over dissenters, to convert wrong-doers. It 
is one thing to do this : it is a very different thing 
to explode opinions from the platform in sound 
and fury. The luxury of doing good is in the one, 
the luxury of oppugnation in the other. 

The New-England churches were made up of 
practical men. Their clergy contained few men 
to whom the luxury of oppugnation was a neces- 
sity. They had access to the Southern religious 
mind through community of religious faith. Sev- 
eral great Christian denominations bound the two 
sections of the country together. For once and a 
half the lifetime of a generation, good men at the 
South were open to conviction on the slavery ques- 
tion, if approached in a sensible way by good men 
at the North. The clergy of the North were not 
willing to sacrifice that hold upon the Southern 
conscience by affiliation with extremists. They 
ought not to have been so. It was good policy, in 
the sense of sound practical wisdom, to hold aloof 
from men of destructive aims and passions. An 
alliance with such men was too heavy a load to 
carry. 

Many of our ministry did avail themselves of 
their religious hold upon the South as long as it 
was of any practical use. The ablest arguments 



206 My Study: and Other Essays. 

in defense of the antislavery cause were published 
by them. When the abolitionists were boiling over 
in the frenzy of the reform, the ministry, like sol- 
diers in trenches, under fire of shot and shell from 
both sides, were calmly laying down its principles, 
and building up its proofs. When the one class 
were denouncing the Bible for its complicity with 
slavery, the other were using it as the great bul- 
wark of freedom. The most effective arguments 
in antislavery literature are the biblical arguments, 
and the most masterly summary of them in the 
language is the work of a Northern clergyman. 1 
It was published chiefly in the hope of reach- 
ing the conscience and reason of the Southern 
churches. It probably had ten readers at the 
South where " The Liberator " had one. 

As a matter of practical wisdom, it would have 
been insane for such men as the author of that 
book to join hands with abolitionists of the school 
of Wendell Phillips and Mr. Garrison. The Rev. 
Albert Barnes spoke the conviction which the 
policy of that school had forced upon the thought- 
ful Christian men of the time, when he said, " If 
a just cause could be killed by the folly of its 
friends, the cause of African liberty would have 
been so by the spirit and methods of the aboli- 
tionists." 

A single reminiscence of the civil war will illus- 
trate this fact of the impolicy of alliance with 
the abolitionists on the part of the clergy. A 

1 See "Barnes on Slavery." 



New-England Clergy and Antislaverg. 207 

Massachusetts chaplain in the war-time was under 
the command of Gen. Butler at Yorktown. He 
was ordered to take possession of a Presbyterian 
pulpit. He was obliged to spend a half-day, more 
or less, in defending himself from the charge of 
infidelity. " Where are you from ? " — " From Mas- 
sachusetts." — " Doesn't Garrison live in Massachu- 
setts? Theodore Parker — isn't he in Massachu- 
setts? Are they not Congregationalists, as you 
are ? Do you come here from red-handed fellow- 
ship with the men who have brought all this trou- 
ble upon us, to preach to us the gospel of Jesus 
Christ ? " Such was the animus of the colloquy. 
It illustrates how ponderous was the load of ob- 
loquy which a clergyman had to carry, if he was 
tainted with suspicion of fellowship with the aboli- 
tionists of Boston. To the Southern religious 
mind, they represented the extreme type, not only 
nor chiefly of hostility to slavery, but of more 
venomous hostility to Christianity itself. 

On all the grounds here considered, the two 
classes of antislavery men now under review 
parted by an intense and unconquerable repulsion. 
They could not do otherwise. There were no 
moral affinities which could outweigh these anti- 
pathies. The poles of an electric battery are not 
more repellent and mutually destructive. Which 
was right, ultimate history must determine. But 
right or wrong on either side, the two could not 
amalgamate. Nor was there any vinculum strong 
enough in fiber to hold them together, even as dis- 



208 My Study: and Other Essays. 

tant allies. They sprang asunder with irresistible 
rebound. The lines of their divergence were like 
those of an hyperbola, diverging now, and diver- 
ging for ever. 

So far as the attitude of the clergy had the look 
to a superficial observer of complicity with slavery, 
or indifference to the outrage it inflicted on the 
rights of man, it was only in the seeming. It was 
a repetition of the social phenomenon which has 
so often overclouded the history of liberty, — that 
thoughtful reformers are outrun and overborne by 
passionate reformers. Men of passion in such a 
conjunction of elements have the advantage over 
men of reason. Reason argues: passion storms. 
Reason persuades: passion denounces. Reason 
wins : passion drives. Reason builds : passion 
burns. If, then, religion happens to be brought 
into the conflict, it is very apt to be driven to the 
wall. Liberty and Christianity are forced into an 
unnatural antagonism. The best that good men 
can do is to make a choice of evils. In their resist- 
ance to infidelity, they must seem to be enemies to 
freedom. Their fidelity to God takes on the look 
of treachery to men. 

Many times over has this monstrous alliance of 
right with wrong taken place in the history of civ- 
ilization. The phenomenon is visible to-day in 
almost every country in Europe. Religion and 
despotism seem to be allies. The Church supports 
the re-actionary State. Hengstenberg in the pul- 
pit joins hands with Trendlenburg at the bar, and 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 209 

both bow to Bismarck at the palace ; and all con- 
spire against nihilistic reform. 

When, anywhere, the critical juncture comes 
in which reform under infidel leadership demands 
the sacrifice of religion to liberty, there can be no 
question where the Christian ministry ought to 
stand, If they are men, they will be true first to 
their Christian vows. To denounce them as trai- 
tors to the rights of man because they will not be 
traitors to the ordinances of God, is not only a 
calumny. It is proof either of woful prejudice or 
of densest ignorance. A very moderate knowl- 
edge of history ought to suffice to save any fair- 
minded man from such a blunder in public affairs, 
and such cynicism in judgment of men. 

Such was at times the enforced attitude of 
the New-England clergy towards the infidel wing 
of antislavery reformers. Looking back now to 
those days of suspended destiny, we claim for the 
churches and clergy of these States, that, as a 
body, they did what men on whom rested the 
responsibility of Christian vows ought to have 
done. That they did no more, was due to the 
unfortunate complications of the reform with 
infidelity. But we claim, that, in what they did 
do, they represented the vital and regenerative 
forces which finally won the victory. To them, 
and to men in sympathy with them, belonged the 
moral weight and momentum which carried the 
nation through those perilous years, and through 
the catastrophe of the civil war. They, and that 



210 My Study: and Other Essays. 

portion of the national mind which thought with 
them, were the power whose decree put an end to 
slavery. It is the unthinking mood of the present 
to laud the abolitionists as the pioneers and the 
autocrats of the antislavery reform. Not so will 
history finally write that page in our annals. 

It is never the destructives who carry to its 
triumph a salutary revolution. It is never they 
who in perilous crises save the State. They and 
the resistants create such crises. The State lives 
through their disastrous agitations in spite of both. 
Its true conservators are the great intermediate 
class between the two extremes. These are led 
by men of collected and balanced minds, men of 
" large discourse," men of long head and not head- 
long in opinions and in policy. The real pioneers 
of the antislavery reform came over in the " May- 
flower." The germs of its triumph circulated in 
the blood of the Puritan stock. And of this no 
other single representative has been so potent all 
along the line of history as the collective mind 
of the New-England churches and their clergy. 

The abolitionists of half a century ago were 
the pioneers of the antislavery conflict, only as the 
Jacobins of Paris were pioneers of the French 
Republic of to-day ; only as the Carbonari of Italy 
were the pioneers of the Italian unity originated 
by Count Cavour ; only as the nihilists of Russia 
are the pioneers of the Russian liberties that are 
to be. It was in perfect keeping with his natural 
affinities that Wendell Phillips left behind him, as 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 211 

the last significant act of his career, a justification 
of the nihilist assassins of St. Petersburg. He 
had been a nihilist all his life. Never is a great 
nation indebted largely to such men for its liberty. 
It is a falsification of history to advance them to 
the front rank of a nation's reformers, and to revere 
them as the rebuilders of the national life. 

The time for writing that antislavery chapter of 
our annals has not yet come. When it does come, 
the historian will ascribe the overthrow of slavery, 
not to the extremists who played their little part, 
and spoke their little pieces, on the stage, and 
passed aw T ay. He will trace it to the statesmen, 
the political economists, the journalists, the histo- 
rians, the poets, the novelists, the educators, the 
scholars, and the preachers, who have been the 
normal leaders of the thought of the great middle 
class. They are the men who have held this 
reform in even balance with other interests of 
State and Church. They are the men of mental 
equipoise, of temperate opinions, of patient reason, 
of wise policies, of weighted speech, and of steady 
force. Such are always the men who carry in their 
persons the destiny of nations. 

The clergy of New England, from John May- 
hew down, have been profound believers. Theirs 
has been a great faith in great ideas. One of those 
ideas has been the identity of the cause of human 
liberty with the cause of Christ. They have been 
at the direct and extreme antipodes to one of the 
New-England abolitionists, who, in the frenzy of 



212 My Study: and Other Essays. 

reform, said, " We must get rid of Christ." Our 
ministry have never for an hour separated these 
two things, — Christianity and Freedom. 

When Choiseul, prime minister of France in the 
time of our revolution, desired to know the temper 
of the American people respecting independence 
from Great Britain, he gave orders that extracts 
should be collected from the sermons of the New- 
England pulpit. He would know what teaching 
the people received from their religious leaders. 
Those papers are still to be found among the 
archives of the French Republic. It was on such 
testimony that he advised the alliance of France 
with America. He found our people instructed 
in the principles of free government, and devoted 
to the cause of liberty. They were the pupils, in 
this respect, not so much of their statesmen as of 
their educated and scholarly ministry. Indeed, 
it is interesting to see the evidences, in the State 
papers and legislative discussions of those days, of 
the indebtedness of our statesmen to the instruc- 
tions of the pulpit under which they had grown 
up. Choiseul trusted both the statesmen and the 
people for the sake of their religious teachers. 
" Like priest, like people," was the proverb of his 
nation. 

The same trust has been deserved by the New- 
England clergy to this day. They have never 
been false to their inheritance. They have been 
reformers without being fanatics. They have 
been advanced thinkers without being destruc- 



New-England Clergy and Antislavery. 213 

tives. They have been men who could build the 
new without ruin to the old. They have held 
their own valiantly among the elect spirits of all 
ages, on the side of right, of freedom, of progress, 
and of God. 



XVII. 
MASSACHUSETTS AND THE QUAKERS. 

It is an old story, but it needs revision. We 
are accustomed to excuse the action of Massachu- 
setts in that business of the Quakers, on the ground 
that she was fully abreast with the age, and by some 
paces beyond it, in the humaneness of her legisla- 
tion. But this is not all. A careful investigation 
of the case discloses other grounds, which would 
have made it seem an anomaly to the judgment of 
the age if Massachusetts had not hanged such 
Quakers as she had to deal with. 

One ground of her defense is the unique tenure 
by which the Colony held their ownership of the 
territory. They held it, not by royal patent alone. 
That might have given to others the same right 
that they had to a local habitation and to civil 
rights here. They held it by individual and col- 
lective purchase. Their charter confirmed in un- 
equivocal terms the right they had in common law 
to say who should, and who should not, set foot on 
the soil. It made that right the full equivalent 
of individual ownership, not merely the right of 
political sovereignty. Every rod of land covered 
by their charter, they held by the same tenure by 
which a man owned his door-yard. 

214 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 215 

Every man's house is his castle. He has the 
right to eject from the lands covered by his title- 
deeds any intruder thereon. If he says the word, 
the trespasser must go. If the unwelcome guest 
refuses to obey the order, the owner has the right 
to use so much of personal force as may be neces- 
sary to rid his property of the nuisance. Law is 
not nice, and was not then, in estimating the rea- 
sons for the ejection. With reason, or without rea- 
son, the owner might remove the intruder from the 
premises. That a man had red hair, or wore a 
beard, was reason enough if the owner thought so. 
Law is not squeamish, and was not then, in meas- 
uring the exact degree or kind of force used in 
the expulsion. While aiming at substantial jus- 
tice, it left a large leeway to the discretion of the 
proprietor in this respect. It made large allow- 
ance for passion and mistake in the righting of a 
wrong. It did not hold the owner to the bond as 
severely as Portia held Shyloek. It recognized a 
right in the matter, which must somehow be vin- 
dicated, and not sacrificed through fear of hurting 
somebody. 

Such was law as applied to colonial ownership 
of the land. Our fathers held the streets and 
commons of Boston as their own estate as sacredly 
as Gov. Winthrop held the house he lived in. 
This ownership by the body politic was carried so 
far, that, when Judge Sewall wanted to build an 
ell seven feet square to his house on the present 
site of the building of the Massachusetts Histori- 



216 My Study: and Other Essays. 

cal Society, he was obliged to ask leave of the 
General Court. It was this precise and sacred 
right of domain that the Quakers outraged. They 
did it in ways the most offensive that could be 
devised to the stern proprieties and the sterner 
morals of the Pilgrims. 

Who, and what, were the colonial Quakers of 
those days? "We must not imagine to ourselves 
meek and saintly men and women in modest drab 
apparel hanging on four gibbets on Boston Com- 
mon. They were not such men as William Penn, 
and such women as Lucretia Mott. The sect was 
in its infancy: hardly that — it was in embryo. 
Every new sect is at first composed, in part, of 
men whose minds move in tangents. Eccentric 
men, crotchety men, men to whose vision nothing 
has two sides, are apt to get astride of a new thing 
in religion or in politics, as of a hobby-horse, and 
to ride off with it from the solid globe peopled by 
sensible men into the boundless spaces. Such men, 
too, are always attracted to a new country. Under 
the influences of such minds, the Quaker fraternity 
in Massachusetts passed its embryonic stage. It 
was not nearly so maturely developed as in the old 
country. Fanaticism overweighted piety. Eccen- 
tricity took precedence of good sense. The sect 
had not reached the age of respectability. It had 
not acquired that position in the world which 
wealth and numbers give, and which in every reli- 
gious organization bring in worldly considerations 
to balance the tendency to fanaticism. The four 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 217 

men and women — or woman rather, for there was 
but one — of whom the Colony rid itself so tragi- 
cally, were people who, in the name of conscience 
and the " divine light," outraged the laws of de- 
cency and morality. They need the mantle of 
charity more than Massachusetts does, and they 
deserve it less. 

It goes against the grain of something in our 
better nature, to admit the plea of conscience in 
their behalf. A good consaience is good sense. 
When it is the voice of God, it speaks with dig- 
nity and self-possession. It is perilous to train the 
public conscience or one's own to shield a thing 
which the common sense of mankind can not re- 
spect. The world is very keen in knowing when 
to spell the word with a large " W." Men vener- 
able for conscience' sake do not tramp naked 
through the streets at mid-day. Saintly women 
do not march unclothed, yet unblushing, up and 
down the broad aisles of churches at the hour of 
public worship. Even the dying words of " mar- 
tyrs " ought not to pass for much when they suf- 
fer for shameless deportment. Mary Dyer on the 
scaffold is a sad spectacle, but not a respectable 
one. We can not weep a great while at her 
saintly words. 

Yet this was the style of Quaker which the 
magistrates of Massachusetts had to deal with. 
A very different sort of being evidently from 
Benjamin Franklin and George Fox. To hang 
him was not well ; but, under the circumstances, 
his resolve to be hanged was worse. 



218 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Another fact which has seldom received the 
weight which it deserves, is that, as it respects the 
plea of conscience, the magistrates stood on ground 
at least as lofty as that of the Quakers. The scru- 
ples of the one were as worthy of respect as those 
of the other. Both lived in an age of twilight. 
Each party regarded the other as advocates of pes- 
tilent beliefs and damnable practices. The con- 
science of each denounced the other in the name 
of God. The Quaker obeyed his " inner light : " 
the magistrate obeyed his oath. Looking at the 
conflict at its worst for the case of the government, 
it was an action of " Conscience versus Conscience." 
If the recusants committed a venial offence in their 
resistance to the State under stress of conscience, 
an equal stress of conscience must relieve the 
State also with equal reason. In the court of 
conscience, we can discern only an immovable 
body in the pathway of an irresistible force. Who 
shall give a verdict? If the execution of the 
Quakers was murder, their resolve to be executed 
was suicide. What is the moral distinction be- 
tween the two ? 

But the contestants for conscience' sake were 
not equal. They did not stand on common ground 
in asking for the verdict of mankind. The State 
represented the moral convictions of the age. She 
was supported by the common conscience of the 
world. Numbers do not make a right, but they 
do palliate a wrong. The State had the moral 
authority of numbers at her back. She was ex- 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 219 

ecuting the ancient laws of England. Those laws 
she had not originated, but inherited. She contin- 
ued a policy which the ablest statesmen and the 
wisest jurists of the past had created for the safety 
of public order. Till then, nobody had ventured 
to question its rectitude or its necessity. The 
recusants represented a novelty in government, 
and a frenzy in religion. They defied the laws of 
morality as enacted in all civilized lands and times. 
They claimed the right to do it in defiance of law 
of ancient usage, and of the moral sense of nations. 

Under these conditions, we claim, that, in the 
court of conscience, the two contestants were not 
equals. The State was morally the superior. She 
anticipated in her final action the jurisprudence of 
enlightened nations down to our own time. She 
was in the same dilemma, in kind, in which the 
United-States Government now is in the solution 
of the Mormon problem. She defended that which 
the common sense of the world now defends as 
essential to the well-being of society, the qualms 
of fanatical consciences to the contrary notwith- 
standing. With these accompaniments as a frame- 
work, the " murder " of the Quakers is a less 
repulsive picture than their " suicide." 

Another fact pertinent to the matter is, that, 
when the law of banishment was enacted, the 
Commonwealth did not mean to execute it. It 
was the explosion of a blank cartridge. Until the 
time of that tilt with the offending Quakers, the 
threat of legal penalty had been sufficient to rid 



220 My Study: and Other Essays. 

the colony of such nuisances. English precedents 
had placed many penal statutes on record, which 
were meant as threats only. Nearly two hundred 
and fifty crimes were then by English law punish- 
able with death, not half of which probably ever 
resulted in the execution of the penalty. True, 
it is not good government to enact laws to be a 
dead letter; but such was the usage of the age. 
In Massachusetts it had not worked badly. Other 
men had been exiled; and, when the State told 
them to go, they went. Other impracticable con- 
sciences had been banished for the peace of the 
infant nation; and, when told that they were not 
wanted here, they went where they were wanted. 
Roger Williams, under sentence of exile, migrated 
over the State-line into Rhode Island; and he 
stayed there. All the experience which up to 
that time our fathers had had, with delinquents 
of tangential minds and crotchety conscience, had 
been with men and women who had not thought 
it worth while to defy the whole artillery of the 
State for the hum of the " bee in their bonnets." 

Other such laws remained a score of years on 
the statute-books without a solitary execution. A 
law was passed, that, for certain offenses, the cul- 
prit should have his tongue bored through with a 
hot iron. The fathers had a great many irons in 
the fire, but that iron was never once withdrawn. 
The threat sufficed. So they expected the law 
against Quakers to work, and with good reason. 
Neither government nor people desired to hang 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 221 

a Quaker. They were not affectionately fond of 
Quakers, but neither were they ferociously fond 
of hanging Quakers. They did not take kindly 
to the Quaker sect, nor to its notions of social 
decency; but as little did they take thirstily to 
the business of the scaffold in social discipline. 

In picturing the scene, therefore, of the four 
gibbets on Boston Common, we must not fancy 
that we see a crowd of sanctimonious Puritans 
exulting with nasal psalmody in the sufferings of 
meek and godly offenders. There was no such 
thing. Our fathers were there in no bloodthirsty 
spirit. They did not visit upon helpless victims 
a malign authority. They did not even go out of 
their way to seek occasion for the execution of the 
law. On the contrary, they did every thing in 
their power to avoid it as a misfortune. They 
reasoned, they pleaded, they coaxed, they preached, 
they exhorted, they threatened, they expostulated, 
they prayed, they tried silence, they tried time, they 
appointed a fast-day, they consulted the clergy, 
they took counsel of the judges, they sought 
wisdom from the wisest men in England, they 
summoned the General Court, before they would 
give to the refractory and defiant Quakers the 
doom they sought. When at last the tragic end 
came, both Government and people were heartily 
tired of the whole business. If they could have 
begun it with the experience with which they 
ended, the deed never would have been done. 
"We desire their life absent, rather than their 



222 My Study: and Other Essays. 

death present," said the magistrates ; and the peo- 
ple responded, "So say we all." On this point, 
there were not two opinions in the whole colony. 

But the Quaker of colonial Massachusetts was 
an anomalous being. Only in the nickname, and 
a few other trifles, did he resemble the clear- 
headed and sound-hearted " Friend " of our times. 
He was a monomaniac. He was open neither to 
reason nor to suasion. He yielded to neither 
threat nor promise. He lived in a delirious antag- 
onism to other men. In Shakspeare's "Julius 
Csesar," Brutus says of Cicero, — 

" He will never follow any thing 
That other men begin." 

Such was the colonial Quaker. His theory of the 
"inner light" made every man his own God. He 
had visions and dreams which lifted him above all 
law. He heard voices in the air, and saw things 
uncanny in the night-time. What other men 
"began," he could not "follow." What other 
men would not begin, he was very apt to have a 
revelation from heaven that he must begin. A 
blissful mania for minorities possessed him. That 
other men took off their hats in courtesy to a 
stranger, was reason enough to him for keeping 
his hat on. That other men said "You," was 
equivalent to a divine command to him to say 
" Thou." That men generally wore rolling collars 
to their coats, was enough to make it a sin to him 
to wear any collar at all. 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 223 

The world is large enough for only one such 
man. Two of them, with the whole planet to 
themselves, would fight, and the weaker would 
get the worst of it. Such men are fanatics, not 
of the colossal type, like Ignatius Loyola, not 
even of the terrible and malign type, like Tor- 
quemada, but of the puny sort, like our wretched 
Freeman of Pocasset, who butchered his sleeping 
child in emulation of Abraham, and w^hom we 
have shut up in a madhouse for no very satisfac- 
tory reason^ except that we do not know what else 
to do with him. Our fathers of the olden time 
would have hanged him. Is it certain that they 
would not have been wiser than we? The plea 
of insanity for every abnormal horror which human 
nature perpetrates in its freaks of vanity, is quite 
too slippery for sensible government. The halter 
is less so, and less liable to abuse. 

Such was the unreasoning, somnambulistic Qua- 
ker of Massachusetts in the colonial age. He came 
to Massachusetts, not because he had any business 
here, but because he was told to stay away. One 
of them could invent no excuse for coming till he 
saw the gibbet awaiting him if he did come. His 
soul hankered after the service of God in an 
exalted station. He longed to make a grand spec- 
tacle of his mission, even though it should be given 
him at the rope's end. Had he been a Frenchman, 
he would have committed suicide by a leap from 
the summit of the Tower VendSme. The world 
has always been at its wits' end to know what to 



224 My Study: and Other Essays. 

do with such men. They are not downright ma- 
niacs , they are not imbeciles ; they are too old for 
asylums for feeble-minded children ; yet they are 
not men of sense. Unfortunately, we haye no 
half-way refuge between the asylum and the scaf- 
fold. 

There is a border-land between insanity and 
crime which neither our medical science nor our 
jurisprudence has yet thoroughly explored. Clouds 
and darkness envelop it. The most accomplished 
experts of the age were divided in opinion as to 
the execution of Guiteau. In that cloudland the 
colonial Quaker roamed and dreamed. The au- 
thorities of the Commonwealth had too many other 
things to do to allow them to solve the obscure 
politico-moral problems upon which the culture of 
our own age is yet so reticent. 

Martyrdom unsought and for a great principle, 
is a sublime and holy thing. It deserves monu- 
ments in the highways, and shrines on the hills, to 
which pilgrims shall go for inspiration and prayer. 
But martyrdom invited is of quite another sort. 
There have been times when martyrdom was a 
fashion. Men and women fell into a frenzy about 
it, and sought it as horses are said to rush into a 
burning stable. Some minds are born with that 
kind of idiosyncrasy. " There are ever appearing 
in the world, men who, almost as soon as they are 
born, take a bee-line for the rack of the inquisitor 
or the ax of the tyrant." Many years ago, in the 
old days of slavery, a slave-insurrection broke out 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 225 

in South Carolina. The leaders were arrested and 
hanged by the dozen. At last a passion for the 
scaffold grew up among the negroes. They in- 
formed falsely against themselves. They con- 
fessed in the face of a proved alibi. Life was a 
feather in the scale against the drama of the scaf- 
fold. The masters were compelled to stay the 
slaughter of their human chattels. 

Martyrdom thus -sought and prayed for, and 
when the thing in dispute is the pitiful right to 
outrage the common decencies of life, is no longer 
the sacred thing which history calls by the name. 
It is not even respectable — no more so than any 
other kind of insane delusion : it is only pitiable. 
If it is not insanity, it is not even misfortune : it 
is a crime. The judgment of the world ranks it 
with suicide. Its victims by ancient law were 
buried at cross-roads. Such was the "martyr- 
dom " of the Massachusetts Quakers. The chief 
fault of the colonial government was not, that it 
executed the laws of the land against them, but 
that it was not wise enough to let them alone, 
except to clothe the naked, and send them to the 
lockup. If " Punch " had existed then, they might 
have been safely left to the pillory of its ridicule. 
It is an error to dignify such indecencies, when 
committed in the name of conscience, by the inflic- 
tion of solemn penalties. The only penalty they 
need is the broad laugh of common sense. 

Under all the provocations which the colonists 
suffered, the public opinion through the whole 



226 My Study: and Other Essays. 

transaction was averse to the extreme penalty of 
the law. The humane sentiment which soon after 
reformed the sanguinary laws of England in the 
colony, was then struggling to the birth; and in 
the House of Deputies the Act against the Quakers 
was carried by a majority of one only. The tem- 
per of the people was humane. At a time when 
the penal code of England recognized nearly two 
hundred and fifty capital crimes, that of Massa- 
chusetts counted less than ten. A century and a 
half later Sir Samuel Romilly said of the code of 
the mother country, " I have examined the codes 
of all nations, and ours is the worst. It is worthy 
of the Anthropophagi." 

Such was the school of jurisprudence in which 
our fathers had been trained. They were not in 
spirit a persecuting race of men. Their severity 
was a short-lived experiment, almost the last wave 
of intolerance from the shores of England, which 
expended itself in Boston in but four cases of 
execution. The law which made Quakerism a 
felony remained on the statute-books of England 
many years after it was repealed in Massachusetts. 
New England has often been contrasted to her dis- 
advantage in this respect with the Old Dominion, 
as if all the intolerance of the country was con- 
centrated in the four Eastern colonies. But the 
Puritans of Massachusetts had repealed the laws 
against the free exercise of religion by the Quakers 
a long while before the Cavaliers of Virginia did it. 

Why, then, did Massachusetts execute the an- 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 227 

cient law at all ? A fair question, and quickly an- 
swered. She was weak, and in peril. This is the 
explanation, and the whole of it. Like other weak 
powers in danger, she vaulted into the extreme of 
self-defense. The whole business was the work of 
conscious feebleness in an emergency. It was not 
yet proved that the Colony could live. The age 
was one of eccentric beliefs and abnormal prac- 
tices. All the religious and political cranks in the 
kingdom, as is usual with new countries, seemed 
to gravitate towards New England. In all the 
colonies, there was an abnormal proportion of dis- 
orderly elements. Men of broken fortunes, fugi- 
tives from creditors and from justice, abounded. 
When to these were added emigrants who came 
with fanatical religious ideas, it is not surprising, 
that, to thoughtful minds, the danger sometimes 
appeared imminent that the Colony would be over- 
whelmed by elements not in sympathy with the 
objects of its foundation. In dread of that catas- 
trophe, some had already begun to think of a new 
migration, they knew not whither. 

Danger from the savages also was by no means 
obsolete. King Philip's war was yet to come. 
The firelocks on the kitchen-walls of the settlers 
had had no time to become rusty. There were 
outlying settlements remaining, in which men wor- 
shiped in the churches on the Lord's Day, lean- 
ing on their muskets ; and hoed their corn in the 
spring, and gathered in their crops in the summer, 
with muskets loaded and primed on the stumps 



228 My Study: and Other Essays. 

not yet cleared from the forest-soil. Besides, the 
old generation of pioneers were gone. Heroic 
men and more heroic women had passed away. 
New-comers felt weakened by the loss. Gov. 
Winthrop lay in what is now King's-chapel grave- 
yard. He had been a host in himself. He was a 
foreseeing man, who discerned new truths in their 
dawning, and whose mind was inventive of expe- 
dients. Had he been living, the Quaker tragedy 
might not have happened. His wise and balanced 
judgment would have discovered some other way 
of extricating the State from its dilemma. 

All these things combined to deepen the sense 
of insecurity in the popular mind, and specially in 
the minds of the magistrates on whom the respon- 
sibility for the public safety rested. To them it 
seemed of prime importance, that the prestige of 
law should be kept inviolate. In troublous times, 
it would not do to show the white feather. It was 
not safe to let the savages of one continent, and 
the bedlamites of the other, know, that, when 
Massachusetts made up her mind, she did not 
know it. The suspicion must not be bruited, that, 
when she expressed her mind in statute, she did 
not mean it, or dared not execute it. No: this 
would never do. 

Gov. Bradford of Plymouth, in the infancy 
of that colony, when his whole force of fighting- 
men was reduced to fifty against the five thou- 
sand whom the Narragansetts threatened to bring 
against him, sent back to them his belt filled with 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 229 

powder and shot in response to their challenge 
with a rattlesnake-skin. The same policy of bra- 
vado may well have prompted the magistrates of 
Massachusetts, a generation later, to put on stern 
faces, and stand by their law against disturbers of 
the peace. They had said it, and the world must 
not think them too weak or too timid to do it. 
Weakness in an emergency struggling, not for 
life, but for things dearer than that, was at the 
bottom of the whole sad business. 

This, at least, was the meaning of it, as it seemed 
to the vigilant judgment of those who must bear 
the responsibility of it before God and man. Tak- 
ing all things into account, it was a less unworthy 
thing to do, and is more deserving of the respect 
and sympathy of mankind, than the conduct of the 
Quakers in braving the law and the public senti- 
ment of the age. It is time that history should 
reverse the proportions of her verdict. She should 
transfer to the suffering offenders a large part of 
the censure which thus far Massachusetts has 
borne almost alone. Mr. Bancroft is quite too 
abject in his apologies for the colonial govern- 
ment. So, it is respectfully suggested, was the 
tone of the " confession " volunteered, some time 
ago, to a Friends' Meeting by some of our good 
brethren in Maine. That confession might better 
have read in this wise : " We humbly confess, that, 
in the ancient tilt between Puritanism and Quaker- 
ism, there was fault on both sides ; and, as it was a 
great while ago, we are glad to believe that they 
have made it up before this time." 



230 My Study: and Other Essays. 

It has been too long the fashion, with a class of 
thoughtless critics, to fling at the Pilgrims for this 
Quaker business and the more dismal affair at 
Salem. That their fame has been able to bear so 
much of that kind of criticism, is proof that mate- 
rial for fair censure must be very scant in their 
history. The fame of Greek philosophers and 
Roman poets and English statesmen and French 
scientists could not have borne the half of it. 
These men the world has set in the frame of the 
ages in which they lived, and judged them by 
the temper of those ages. But the Pilgrims have 
been isolated from the world they knew and 
judged by the illumination of times, of which, with 
all their foresight, they never dreamed. It is time 
to have done with this. Let the Pilgrims have 
fair play. Set them in the place where their des- 
tiny put them, and judge them by its opportunities 
and possibilities. Their descendants have no fear 
of the result. They need no laudation of ours. 

As soon as the condition of the colony improved, 
and the public safety seemed to be assured, the 
laws against Quaker immigration became a dead 
letter. They died out, as such laws have commonly 
done, because nobody cared enough about them to 
execute them. Persecuting powers commonly be- 
come more cruel as they grow stronger. Not so 
Massachusetts. When time and numbers consoli- 
dated her resources, and gave her the conservative 
consciousness of strength, she grew more humane. 
The cultured instincts of her religion came to 



Massachusetts and the Quakers. 231 

the surface, and diffused a Christian civilization 
through her institutions and social customs. She 
became, without exception, the most enlightened 
and liberal government in the world. The Quakers 
came and went at their pleasure, with none to 
molest them or make them afraid. And such is 
human nature in Quaker garb, as in that of Cava- 
lier or Roundhead, that, when the State no longer 
gave them the dignity of the scaffold, they did not 
care to come in large numbers ; and the sect has 
always been small on our soil. Cotton Mather 
quaintly told the denotement of the story. " Since 
our Jerusalem was come to such consistence, that 
the going up of every fox would not break down 
our stone walls, who has ever meddled with 'em ? " 



XVIII, 
DOES THE WORLD MOVE? 

A stoey is told of a thrifty old lady in New 
York, who once listened to a colloquial discussion 
of the merits of modern progress. At the close, 
she summed up her own wisdom on the subject 
by observing, " For my part, the best signs I see 
of progress are two, — omnibuses and lucifer 
matches." Had she put it thus, Facility of travel 
and the preservation of fire, she would have been 
a home-made philosopher of the materialistic school. 
These are great facts in modern life. Civilization 
owes much to them. 

If the question were circulated for a vote in an 
assembly of intelligent men, Is the human race on 
an advance rather than a retreat ? nine out of ten 
would vote in the affirmative, and would give in 
evidence things belonging to the same school with 
the omnibus and the lucifer match. Material 
progress is sure to make itself heard and seen. 
The rumbling of a railroad train burdens the very 
night air. The tramp of an army makes the earth 
tremble. An Armstrong gun, if not heard, is 
heard of, around the globe. Such things compel 
observation, and force their way into history. 

232 



Does the World Move? 233 

They often crowd out of sight and hearing the 
silent revolutions. 

Is the evidence as clear that there are silent 
revolutions in which the world is moving to the 
conquest of great intellectual and moral improve- 
ments ? Is man on a line of march forward in the 
realm of Ideas? 

I. It is very certain that the time has been when 
the world did advance in the growth of great ideas, 
which we of to-day inherit. Wordsworth said that 
in his day, " plain living and high thinking " were 
no more; but they had been in better times. 
History has stored them in imperishable records. 
The Greek idea of beauty, for example, has become 
the world's treasure. It will never grow obsolete. 
The Greek idea of poetry has passed into all sub- 
sequent literatures, and will live there for ever. 
Plato and Aristotle to this day are the two foci of 
all the philosophy which the world has thought 
out. So much, at least, the past has conquered 
from barbarism, which the future will never let 
die. 

Rome also had her mission to the generations of 
all subsequent time. It was a mission of ideas 
more than of material progress. The Roman idea 
of law lives in all the jurisprudence of the world, 
which has any chance of perpetuity. Its ramifica- 
tions run through the institutions on which every 
great national life of to-day depends. An empire 
like that of England never could have lived, but 
for Rome's tribute to its foundation in law and 



234 My Study : and Other Essays. 

obedience to law. The Middle Ages would have 
been a fatal and final relapse into Vandalism, but 
for the conservative ideas infused into them by 
Roman history. 

The same creative idea of Law was the thing 
which made possible the birth of the American 
Republic. To Rome as a republic, herself realiz- 
ing republican institutions, we owe very little in 
comparison with our debt to Rome the empire, 
which gave solidity to law as a power capable of 
ruling a world. American eloquence from the 
Revolution down has been adorned with a great 
deal of flourish over the Roman and Greek democ- 
racies, but it is surprising how little our fathers 
really appropriated from the ancient stock of ideas. 
It was almost nothing worth mentioning. The 
ancient democracy was not the modern republic. 
The real power from antiquity, which built the 
foundation of our free institutions, was the mailed 
hand of Roman law which pervaded all Roman 
history, from the Tarquins to the Caesars, and 
which grew to its full, athletic muscle in the best 
days of the empire. 

The critical question respecting modern progress 
is, Has it any thing equal to that of ancient times 
to show for itself in the world of ideas? Is it 
adding any thing to the world's stock of heroic 
and immortal thought? A railway map of a con- 
tinent is a grand thing to look at. The tramp of 
a million armed men is an imposing thing to hear. 
An invisible spirit seems to live in a telescopic rifle 



Does the World Move? 235 

which kills at a distance of a mile. But these are 
things of course, in a world so full as this of mate- 
rial forces. Such forces must come out in some 
such marvelous inventions. They do not symbol- 
ize the ultimate or the best conquests of mind. 
What is a mini^-rifle compared with the Parthe- 
non? What is a Pacific railroad by the side of 
Homer's Iliad? What is the army of Marshal 
von Moltke as an offset to the Laws of Justinian ? 

The triumphs of material progress are toys and 
gewgaws in the comparison with those of mind. 
The true welfare of nations is in the world of 
Ideas. Its central force is conscience. u The 
evolution of a highly destined society must be 
moral. It must run in the grooves of the celes- 
tial wheels." 

II. Have we, then, any thing in our modern civ- 
ilization which can rival the great ideas of the an- 
cient world ? Yes, — things so many and so grand 
that they outweigh all the past. Yet they are so 
inwrought into the warp and woof of our social 
life, that we are, for the most part, unconscious of 
them. The rehearsal of them seems like recount- 
ing a string of truisms. We live them without 
knowing it. We of this generation have been 
born to them : we know no other way. Yet the 
most of them and the best are mainly the growth 
of the last three hundred years. 

One of these formative ideas, on which modern 
society is built, is that of the human brotherhood. 
So trite is it, that our literature indulges in a great 



236 My Study: and Other Essays. 

deal of cant about it. But men do not cant about 
ideas that have nothing grand in them. This idea 
to the ancient world was as completely unknown 
as the American continent. One of the silent 
revolutions which change the face of nations, was 
that in which the fundamental idea of society was 
changed from the state to the family. That men 
of all races, nations, classes, and conditions are 
brother men, each one responsible for all, and all 
for each, the equal children of one household whose 
Father is God, is a theory of society which in its 
fullness has been the growth of the last two centu- 
ries. Now, it is semi-barbarism not to believe it. 
To go back of it in legislation is like reverting to 
the Chaldsean astrology in place of the astronomy 
of Copernicus and Kepler. That astronomy is as 
likely to become obsolete in our observatories as 
the idea of brotherhood in our legislation, or in 
our unwritten social laws. The world took a long 
stride forward when this idea became fixed in mod- 
ern jurisprudence. 

Another of the creative ideas of modern life is 
that of individual liberty. When the freedom of 
class, of tribe, of nation, of race, was exchanged 
for the freedom of the individual, a great leap was 
made over the chasm which separates the ancient 
from the modern world. The chief reason why 
our fathers found so little in the institutions of 
Greece and Rome which they could utilize directly 
in the building of the Republic, was that the 
Greek and Roman ideas of freedom were so radi- 



Does the World Move ? 237 

cally diverse from theirs. Liberty, to the ancient 
mind, was liberty of race, or nation, or tribe. It 
involved liberty to enslave another race. England 
was the first great empire which recognized, ever 
so dimly, the right of the individual to himself. 
It was never formally and fully enunciated as the 
cornerstone of government till the Declaration of 
Independence, in 1776, proclaimed that all men 
are created free, and have the right to life and lib- 
erty. Observe, the right to life was not more 
sacred in their theory than the right to liberty. 
Imperfectly as the fathers realized it in the insti- 
tutions they founded, they did see its reality in 
theory; and theirs was a modern discovery. As a 
practical principle of government, to be put to use 
in the construction of a great republic, it was a 
new idea. The democratic idea which had ger- 
minated long before in the forests of Germany was 
not this American idea. 

Our fathers left it for this generation to settle 
by the right of the strongest, the question of 
human servitude everywhere. And we have set- 
tled it for all time. Never will another state be 
founded on the right of man to hold property in 
his brother man. Never will another great war 
be waged for the principle that a man may be 
owned and whipped and branded and bought and 
sold by his fellow like an ox. This idea of indivi- 
dual liberty is fixed in the law of nations beyond 
the reach of any refluent wave of barbarism. 

Kindred to this, and a necessary corollary from 



238 My Study: and Other Ussays. 

it, is the modern idea of independence in religious 
belief. It has become a truism in history, that 
even Puritan faith, so stanch and true to liberty 
in all things else, could not see the logic of its 
own principles working out freedom in religion. 
Its well-known notion of religious liberty was lib- 
erty to believe right. To believe wrong, was a 
crime. Liberty to believe it, was anarchy. It 
deserved rather the scourge and the branding-iron. 
That the civil government ought to punish a man 
for believing falsely, was as plain as a pike-staff to 
them. Why is it not as plain to us ? Because a 
new and original idea — which, perhaps, John 
Barneveldt, prime minister of Holland, was the 
first to enunciate in its completeness, and for 
which in part he paid the penalty of his life — has 
now become the common property of the age. 
How trite is that idea to us, and how much a 
thing of course ! Our children marvel that great 
men and good men could ever have denied it. 
That their own ancestors did so, has about the 
same reality to them as that their ancestors were 
cannibals. They are horror-struck at Motley's 
story of the Netherlands, as at the rage of maniacs. 
A great idea is fixed in history when children are 
born to it, and can think no otherwise. 

Following in the train of the ideas already 
named, and in necessary alliance with them, is the 
modern theory of the elevation of woman. Of 
slow growth, yet as sure as the growth of a coral 
continent, and as lasting, is this principle of our 



Does the World Move? 239 

most refined and purest civilization. Woman suf- 
frage — that crowing hen — burlesques and retards 
this reform for a little while ; but it is fast accu- 
mulating its trophies in the higher education of 
woman, in the recognition of her rights of prop- 
erty, in the enlargement of the range of her indus- 
trial employments, in just legislation for her in the 
laws of divorce, in her special pre-eminence in 
social charities, and, more than all else, in the 
unwritten social law, by which her companionship 
with man is established without statute to affirm 
it, because without a voice denying it. 

Yet what a change is this from the Roman ideal 
of woman to ours ! Imagine such an institution 
as Smith College in the Rome of the Caesars ! 
Cicero has made the name of his daughter, Tullia, 
immortal by his grief over her death; but what 
do we know of Cicero's wives ? Almost nothing, 
except that he divorced them both by his own 
sheer will. What immeasurable progress from the 
status of the wife of Augustus Caesar to that of 
the wife of President John Adams, or the wife 
of President Garfield! From woman the slave, 
to woman the companion of man ! What a reach 
of revolution it measures ! And from the Oriental 
notion of woman, the advance is beyond measure. 
A Chinese proverb says, "When a daughter is 
born, she sleeps on the ground. She is incapable 
of evil and of good." China and America are on 
opposite sides of the globe in more ways than one. 

These are but a few of the representative ideas 



240 My Study: and Other Essays. 

of modern life, which show the immensity of human 
progress in the world of mind. Associated with 
them, or corollaries from them, are many others. 
They are such as the recognition of the freedom 
of the press and of public speech, of a popular 
literature, of the sacredness of human life, of the 
criminality of war, of the inferiority of a military 
life, of the murderous character of the duel, of the 
dignity of labor, of the equal claims of chastity 
upon the sexes, of reform in the criminal code, of 
the inhumanity of torture in courts of justice, 
of the reformatory element in punishment, of 
humanity in the treatment of the insane, of the 
right of animals to protection from cruelty, of 
gentleness in family government, of the abolition 
of brutality from public schools and from the 
discipline of armies and navies, of the disgrace 
attached to the drinking-usages of society, of the 
subjection of the sale of intoxicating drinks to law, 
of the subordination of wealth to character, and 
of manners to mind in estimating the worth of a 
man. 

To these should be added those germs of ideas, 
which Hazlitt calls the "tops of thoughts," now 
just visible above the surface of society, and pre- 
monitory of the reforms of the coming age. These 
suggest, among other things, the sure approach of 
a more equitable balance of capital and labor, the 
fixing of limits to the accumulation of private 
property, and the regulation of its use by the 
principles of benevolence, and of restrictive legis- 



Does the World Move? 241 

lation against the monopoly of land. They indi- 
cate that the time is approaching when it will be 
a personal disgrace to a man to be possessor of a 
property, the magnitude of which is itself evidence 
that it is an injustice or a menace to the common 
welfare. 

Here is a resplendent galaxy of ideas which light 
up the modern firmament. The whole heavens are 
aglow with them. They prove a world in forward 
and upward movement. The clockwork of the 
sidereal universe is not more certain. They are 
ideas, also, which create great men for their devel- 
opment. When the world is ripe for a truth, that 
truth ripens in some elect mind, one or more, 
whose mission it is to tell it. Every such truth 
creates its own prophet. More than this : it makes 
all men great who accept it, by the use of that 
which is on a level with their immortality. 

Great formative and reformatory ideas, it should 
also be observed, once born into the world, never 
die. They come into it to stay. Power can not 
crush them: time can not wear them out. The 
destructions of nations never bury them in the 
debris, like those works of immortal art which till 
lately were buried under the soil of Rome. The 
conflagration of all libraries could not burn them 
out of the world's thought. Arts are lost : ideas, 
never. So long as one man lives to think them, 
they will sway the civilization of the future. The 
look of things sometimes threatens them. The 
world rolls backward, and seems about to crush 



242 My Study: and Other Essays. 

out its history. But occult forces hold it in the 
grooves of progress. 

Furthermore, these creative thoughts are from 
one source, and ultimately from only one. In 
their fullness, and in forms fitting them for use 
in practical affairs, they all spring from the reli- 
gion of Christ. In every age, those truths which 
have moved the world, and have made the world 
move of itself, have been religious truths, or truths 
born of religious intuitions. Every thing great 
springs from conscience. All our civilization is 
wrapped up in the Lord's Prayer. The world 
never gets to the circumference of the central 
lesson of a Christian nursery. 

It was quite in the natural course of things, that, 
on the night before the " Emancipation Act " went 
into operation in the West Indies, the slaves — 
chattels to-day, men to-morrow — should crowd 
their churches and chapels at midnight, to greet 
the first hour of their liberty with songs of praise 
and prayer to the Most High. Their simple faith 
taught them better than statesmen knew, from 
whence their redemption came. They must needs 
render back the boon to Him who gave it. 

Never was a cannon fired for liberty which had 
not a religious thought behind it. Never was a 
bill of human rights fought for with success which 
had not somewhere for its preamble a bill of human 
duties. The word " ought " is the supreme word 
in all languages. It is the sovereign of all ideas. 
Two thousand years ago Plato discovered that 
" piety is necessary to knowledge." 



Does the World Move? 243 

When Clarkson first laid before William Pitt 
the argument for emancipation in the West Indies, 
he says, " Many sublime thoughts seemed to rush 
into his mind." Sublime thoughts always rush into 
the wake of one great moral idea. It takes but a 
few such ideas to make a history of a thousand 
years. So is it now. These principles on which 
the noblest modern life is constructed are the 
direct outgrowth from the Christian faith. Under- 
neath them are the Christian doctrines of the per- 
sonality and the fatherhood of God, the immortality 
of the soul, the unity and brotherhood of the race, 
a universal atonement, and the freedom of the 
human will. Blot out these doctrines from the 
religion of the few, to whom they are a personal 
faith, and you obliterate in the end, from the civ- 
ilization of the many, the great creative forces 
which have made that civilization what it is. 
Then chaos comes again. 

Yes : the world does move. It did move in the 
ancient ages. It is moving in these times of ours. 
Whatever the surface-currents may seem to indi- 
cate, the lower depths of modern thought are 
moving Godward, beyond the reach of counter- 
currents. They have gained a momentum into the 
still waters of faith which no possible re-actionary 
forces can counter-check. 

One fact out of a score like it gathers into itself 
a volume of proofs of this. Look at the postal 
service of the world. Our very children sport 
with it, and their fathers use it with little or no 



244 My Study: and Other Essays. 

thought of what it means. It is reported that the 
letters dispatched to and fro through the post- 
offices of the nations during the year 1884 num- 
bered fifty-two thousand millions. What a power 
of mind that represents, in what magnificent move- 
ment ! What had the Greek civilization to com- 
pare with it? What had the Roman? Then, 
what significance it carries ! It means intelligence ; 
it means mental activity ; it means alert and intri- 
cate thinking ; it means faith ; it means the flowing 
of all the great ideas which the past has generated 
into the world of the future. Dark ages can never 
come again. 



XIX. 

IS THE CHRISTIAN LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

Richard Baxter was a lifelong sufferer. In- 
curable disease kept him for years at death's door. 
" I live with one foot in the grave," he used to say. 
For twenty years he probably did not know the 
sensations of health. The jubilant spring of life 
in other men became a forgotten joy to him. As 
if this were not enough, he was persecuted for his 
religion. For preaching five sermons he was con- 
demned to imprisonment for five years. Sermons 
were costly luxuries in those days, — a year of pris- 
on-life for each one ! He escaped only by the in- 
terposition of his physician, who swore that the 
execution of the sentence would cost him his life. 

Not a very fascinating life this, to the looker-on ! 
We should not have thought him querulous against 
the providence of God, if he had been the author 
of an essay published not long ago, entitled, "Is 
Life Worth Living?" But the invalid and per- 
secuted preacher published no such thing as that. 
He had no time to ask or answer such a question. 
He was living, and he made the best of it by liv- 
ing to some purpose. He published a hundred and 
forty-five distinct works in the intervals of his 

245 



246 My Study: and Other Essays. 

pains. He was one of the busiest of men, as, 
indeed, Christian invalids have commonly been. 

Of all men in the world, he was the one who 
was moved to write " The Saint's Rest." And so 
understanding^ did he write of it, that to a mil- 
lion of readers since his day, it has seemed as if 
he must have had a foretaste of the heavenly 
blessedness himself. It is supposed that nearly half 
a million of copies of that book have been pub- 
lished, and the popular verdict upon it has every- 
where been the same. It is one of the few books 
so profoundly written from the heart, that their 
insight into truth borders on inspiration. 

Danto wrote of purgatory so feelingly, that 
people, meeting him on the street, used to say, 
" There goes the man who has been in hell." To 
Baxter's million readers, it has seemed that he must 
have been on the other side of the " great gulf." 
Such are the contrasts and contradictions of Chris- 
tian living. Suffering men are the happiest men. 
Women on beds of anguish sing most honestly our 
hymns of Christian triumph. Men in prisons know 
most of Christian liberty. People who have least 
of this world, have most luminous foresight of 
heaven. Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, 
yet making many rich ; having nothing, yet pos- 
sessing all things ; such ideally is the privilege of 
holy living. 

St. Paul appears to have been another of the 
great Christian contradictions. As one reads his 
autobiography, it does seem to lend reason to the 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 247 

conundrum, " Is life worth living ? " He is a man 
of bold nerve who would select St. Paul's life as 
a model of his own. On the human scale of meas- 
urement, the apostle can not be pronounced a happy 
man. He was not hilarious in his temperament. 
He did not sing many comic songs. Men who do, 
can not make much of him. The world would 
not call his life a lucky one. It went hard with 
him at the best. What a history of ill-luck he 
gives us ! Flogged like a slave in the market-place 
five times, and three times in court ; shipwrecked 
three times ; pelted with stones by vagabonds till 
he was left for dead ; in prisons so many that he 
does not count them ; hungry, cold, thirsty, naked, 
robbed ; hunted by murderers, with nothing but a 
wicker basket between him and death ; betrayed 
by friends whom he trusted and prayed for ; in the 
city, in the country, in the wilderness, on the sea, 
everywhere in the wide world, beset by dangers ; 
always guiltless, yet always an outlaw; he was 
saved at last from being clothed with pitch, and 
used as a candle to light the streets of Rome, by 
having his head cut off. And as if the cruelty of 
man were not enough, he must find the Devil on 
his track, and must put to hazard body and soul in 
fight with invisible foes, more ferocious than the 
beasts of Ephesus. 

No : this " bald-pated Galilean," as Lucian con- 
temptuously calls him, was not a lucky man. I 
have somewhere read of a man who, on a journey 
of many weeks, encountered a continuous succes- 



248 My Study: and Other Essays. 

sion of accidents. He fell through broken bridges, 
lie was buried under a wrecked rail-car, he was 
caught in a mountain freshet, highway robbers 
assailed him, a stray pistol-shot grazed his cheek, 
runaway horses threatened his life, a bolt of light- 
ning splintered the tree under which he sought 
shelter in a shower. At last, in the final stage of 
his journey, some of his fellow-passengers, on hear- 
ing his story, declared that a curse was on him ; a 
malign fate was after him ; he would surely die of 
it ; and they hurried out of the car where they had 
found him. They would not risk their lives in 
company with a man whom a legion of fiends pur- 
sued so malignantly. So, judging in the world's 
way, we should say of this old Jew of Tarsus, that 
" the stars in their courses fought against " him. 
He was born to misfortune ; and wise men, who 
valued their lives, would fight shy of him. 

Yet, of all men in the world, this man is the one 
to say, "I will glory in my infirmities." This 
hunted and outlawed " babbler," as the wise men 
of Athens called him, is the man to tell us what a 
blessed thing life is, how grandly worth living, 
what a good fight it is, full of what magnificent 
chances, what a precious thing suffering is, and 
what an imperial coronation glorifies it at the end. 
This is the man who goes to his grave exultingly, 
and celebrates a victory over death ! Can we not 
hear his ringing voice, as he flings the gantlet to 
the great enemy, — O Death, where is thy sting ? 
O Grave, where is thy victory? He really seems 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 249 

to have been one of the happiest of men, yet one 
of the most illustrious of sufferers. Where in all 
history shall we find his peer, — his peer in sorrow, 
his peer in joy ? 

What is the secret of it all ? Christian history 
is full of such contradictions. Unwritten biog- 
raphy abounds with them. Men and women are 
now living such lives in secret. The world does 
not know them, and never will while time lasts. 
But they are a great multitude, whom no man can 
number. Not that there are many Baxters, nor 
do St. Pauls come in crowds. But there is an 
innumerable host of plain men and women, and 
children even, whose lives do approximate and 
honestly claim rank with illustrious saints. Mar- 
tyrs, as a class, have been the most cheerful of 
men. This is the Christian theory of living, — 
that such life is a victory, not a conflict only, and 
least of all is it a losing fight. The "Saint's Rest" 
begins here. Baxter told in plain words what he 
knew. Conquest of death, and triumph over the 
grave, are initiated here in ten thousand Christian 
homes. The psalm of life, as it is sung at count- 
less firesides, is a jubilant one. On beds of pain, 
the songs of Zion are most exultant. 

This is the Christian ideal of life. But what is 
the secret of it ? Can a man enjoy pain ? Does 
God expect us to be happy on a rack ? Are thumb- 
screws and Scotch " boots " playthings ? Is cruci- 
fixion a comedy ? An old legend tells of a species 
of animals which live in fire. They dance on 



250 My Study: and Other Essays. 

burning coals. They gambol in a furnace at white- 
heat. Are men and women made of stuff so sym- 
pathetic with fire ? We, who are not Baxters and 
St. Pauls, but only men of common sort, want a 
solution of the mystery. Some men are weary — 
very weary — of life, or, what is the same thing to 
them, they think they are ; and they need the solu- 
tion desperately. In the watches of the night they 
cry out, " Oh that I had the wings of a dove ! " 

But disconsolate views of life are not the prod- 
uct of healthy Christian living. The protest which 
some assert against their own creation without 
their own consent is profane. No wise man will 
foster such moods in himself. They are a mental 
weakness and a moral wrong. The Bible is a 
manly book. It cherishes an athletic piety. When 
the angel directed Lot's flight from Sodom, he did 
his best to persuade the old man to seek refuge on 
the mountain-top. Only by concession to age and 
fright was he permitted to rest in the lowlands. 
This is emblematic of that type of religion which 
the Bible fosters. It enjoins the difficult duty, 
encourages the arduous achievement, exhorts to 
the aspiring aim, inspires the buoyant hope, makes 
men stout in crises. It puts into a man's religion 
the old feudal element of chivalry. On the same 
principle, it withholds sympathy from cowardly 
views of life and the chronic desire for death. It 
was Christianity which first made suicide infamous. 

The Scriptures do not encourage, even an habit- 
ual meditation on death. They lend no sanction 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 251 

to that monastic life in which men kept a human 
skull always in sight. Christianity never built 
the " Church of St. Ursula and the Eleven Thou- 
sand Virgins " at Cologne, in which the walls are 
made of the virgins' skulls, and glass cases are 
filled with them in ghastly rows around the choir. 
They have no word of sympathy for men who 
build their coffins before the time, and store them 
in their chambers. Emerson tells of a woman 
who for years made up her bed every morning in 
the shape of a coffin, and regaled her fancy with 
the discovery that the tower of a church near by 
threw its shadow in the figure of a coffin on the 
sidewalk every evening. God would have no such 
beggarly piety as this among men and women of 
His creating. In such a world as this, we should 
be too busy to make a hobby of dying. We should 
think of it, only enough to be prepared to meet 
it calmly when it comes, and to look at the life 
beyond as a progress. The majority of thought- 
ful men think too much about it. 

The desire for death is commonly a counterfeit. 
Men do not know their own minds when they 
think death would be welcome, and is long in 
coming. Men who talk in that strain are not con- 
scious hypocrites ; but they fight for dear life when 
the need comes, like the rest of us. One such 
man, at the age of ninety, said that he should be 
glad to die ; but he wanted to live till he was an 
old man. Men who ask with a sneer whether life 
is worth living, if wrecked at sea, swim if they 



252 My Study: and Other Essays. 

can. If attacked by Asiatic cholera, they send 
for a physician, choose the best expert, and send a 
fleet horse for him. If threatened with consump- 
tion, they cross the sea in search of more salubrious 
climes. I have observed, too, that men who fling 
insult at their Creator for giving them an exist- 
ence they never asked for, do not take kindly to 
annihilation. 

Even the mental habits of good men sometimes 
need a correction of perspective in their ideas. I 
once knew a clergyman whose mind was inordi- 
nately intent on heaven. It was the favorite theme 
of his sermons. His prayers often seemed to be 
an inspiration from thence. His favorite hymns 
were descriptive of the better world. In conver- 
sation, he dwelt much upon its employments and 
discoveries. He used to imagine his interviews 
with prophets and apostles. He made up his mind 
who should be the first object of his search among 
them. He lived at the gates of the New Jerusa- 
lem, and they appeared to be ajar to his vision. I 
thought to myself, that it would be an easy thing 
for him to die. He gave a beautiful example, as 
many thought, of what the Scriptures mean when 
they say, " Let your conversation be in heaven ! " 
I anticipated, that, in his last hours, he would have 
visions of the place, and hear music in the air, as 
some dying saints do. 

When the time came, however, he had no visions, 
he heard no songs of angelic rapture. He died of 
a painful, lingering disease, but, through it all, 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 253 

never expressed a desire to go. On the contrary, 
he was one of the most resolute invalids I ever 
knew, in his determination to live. He lived for 
years on his will-power. He sought health, as 
other men do, at every cost. If Heaven then 
seemed to him the more attractive world, he never 
said it to his friends. His favorite Scriptures then 
w r ere not those descriptive of heaven, nor were his 
favorite hymns such. And at last he died, one of 
the silent saints. 

No man knows, or ought to judge, the inner life 
of another. There was much that was beautiful 
and inspiring in the life of that man in his days 
of health. Yet I suspect that his closing years 
were, as a whole, more natural and truthful. 
There was less glamour about them. Probably he 
was a better man in his desire to live, than in his 
old dreams of hastening to see the prophets and 
apostles. He ought to have desired to live, and 
to have done his best to prolong life. The real 
man, the inner core of character, probably came 
to light in his faithful performance of that duty. 
If he could meet the end trustfully, as he did, it 
was not his business to hasten it by so much as a 
wish. While he lived, it was his duty to live. 
One of the most godly things he ever did, to the 
admiration of ministering angels, may have been 
the exercise of that splendid will-power in the 
struggle for life, which he would not relax one jot. 

The Christian ideal of life is health, not disease. 
The beauty of holiness is never hectic. Healthy 



254 My Study: and Other Essays. 

hopes, healthy desires, healthy aims, healthy pray- 
ers, healthy work, healthy retrospects, — these are 
Christian living. The Christ-like ideal consists 
rather in the will-power than in moods of feeling. 
The concentration of the strength of a man upon 
the opportunities and resources which this world 
gives for use in great endeavor, is more Scriptural 
and more natural than going into hiding in the 
chambers of an invalid piety, and there waiting 
for death. In such a life, we are nearer to the life 
of God. We find no time to ask, Is life worth 
living ? and we have as little disposition as time. 

Let us not overlook here the fact that God does 
not sit aloft in remote and inaccessible seclusion 
from our human woes. They are more real to God 
than they are to us. No being in the universe feels 
the pains of human life so deeply as He feels them. 
Not one pang of suffering rasps any human nerve, 
which God does not appropriate as if it were His 
own. This is the working of infinite sympathies 
in the heart of a loving Creator. "In all their 
affliction, He was afflicted." Yet over and above 
the billows of human sorrow, the blessedness of 
God remains intact. In those very sorrows, He 
finds cause of joy, because they are the instru- 
ments of His own benevolence. They have never 
taken Him by surprise. He has made no mistakes 
in them ; nor has He ever permitted one of them 
which He could not use, to more loving purpose 
than He could use ease and comfort and indulgence 
in its place. He is blessed, therefore, not only in 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 255 

spite of them, but in them. And the principle of 
Christian living is, that what God enjoys we can 
enjoy. 

For example, the works of God, the Word of 
God, the plans of God in redemption, His pur- 
poses in the development of a Christian civiliza- 
tion, His joy in Christ, His delight in His own 
perfections, His outflow of benevolence to the 
holy universe, His complacency in the reciprocated 
love of angels and men, and whatever other orders 
of being may people space, His beneficent vigi- 
lance over human sorrows, His foresight and 
decree of their fruits in building character, — all 
these objective tributaries to the great ocean of 
felicity which fills the heart of God are equally 
fitted to be tributary to ours. Why not ? Are we 
not made in God's image ? Are we not like Him 
in our better nature ? Why not like Him, then, in 
our resources which make life worth living ? 

True, all this implies that we are something 
more than creatures of sense. We belong to 
another genus than that of mammalia. We have 
other faculties than the five which physiologists 
count. We are beings of thought, of faith, of 
illimitable desires, of aspirations which penetrate 
eternity. It implies that we ought not to be, 
and can not be, satisfied with pleasures of sense. 
Satiated we may be, but not satisfied. There is 
an antipodal difference between the two. A man 
whose supreme enjoyments are in fine houses and 
costly furnishings, and tasteful grounds, and rich 



256 My Study: and Other Essays. 

conservatories, and fleet horses, and the master- 
pieces of fine art, and the thousand and one things 
which make up the possibly innocent pleasures of 
a sensuous millionaire, is sure to weary of it all in 
the end. Such men often desire, or think they 
desire, to die. They are the men who talk most 
glibly of "the great Perhaps." Suicides are not 
found mainly, or chiefly, among the miserably 
poor. 

Sensuous men have a revolution to undergo 
before they can understand what a grand thing 
life is as a life of godlike opportunity. New tastes 
must come uppermost in their nature. They are 
living on the under side of the universe. Occult 
realities must be revealed to them. They must 
come up into the life of Christ. Wings must 
grow. 

Even a life which, though preponderantly right, 
lacks fullness and intensity in its sympathy with 
the life of God, as the lives of most men do, will 
declare the ascendency of discomfort in the ret- 
rospect at the end. The testimony of the ages 
to such an imperfect life is given in the words of 
the patriarch, " Few and evil have been the days." 

The elder President Adams in his ninetieth year 
said, " I have lived a long, harassed, and distracted 
life." When a friend suggested, "The world 
thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it," 
he responded, " The world does not know how 
much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered." 
Is there no remedy for this never-ending contra- 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 257 

diction between the memory of a prosperous life 
and its seeming to observers? Does it exist in 
any other world than this ? Carlyle expressed it 
in his savage way, " The ground of my existence 
is as black as death." John Foster says of him- 
self, " Something seems to say to me, ' Come away ! 
Come away ! ' I am but a gloomy ghost among 
the living and the happy." And his father used 
for twenty years before his death to pray on every 
New- Year's Day, that the coming year might be his 
last. What is it that such men need ? Something 
surely is awry with them. God never meant that 
men should live " gloomy ghosts" on "ground as 
black as death." Who can disclose to us the great 
secret? 

Physicians have a short way of settling the 
matter. They tell us to get rid of dyspepsia. 
" Obey nature's laws, and get health, and things 
will right themselves ! " As if a man were noth- 
ing but stomach and spleen, such as they preserve 
in alcohol ! But suppose we can not be rid of 
dyspepsia. What then? Must every diseased 
man be miserable? Must the decline of life be 
the decline of every thing that makes one desire 
life ? A genuine soul, possessed of a genuine sym- 
pathy with the life of God, need never see the 
hour when death shall be desirable. The apostolic 
idea means just what it says, " Rejoice in the Lord 
always ! " It is a practicable idea to any man who 
will give Christianity a chance to do what it can 
for him. 



258 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Carlyle would have been a happier man if his 
manhood had realized to him more profoundly the 
faith of his childhood as his mother taught it to 
him. He would have made his home more serene 
to his disconsolate wife. The mother in her nurs- 
ery was wiser than the wise man of whom the 
world stood in awe. Let God be as real to a man 
as an excruciated eyeball, and the excruciated eye- 
ball will become a myth. Many times Christian 
martyrdom has proved this. 

I know there seems to be an exasperating un- 
reality in such a notion of life as this. We are not 
martyrs. We have not the faith of martyrs. So 
we put it to ourselves in honest thought, and we 
wish preachers would talk like men of the world. 
This " life of God " is very high up, and very far 
away. We look up to find it, and we see nothing 
but mocking stars. Scientists tell us that we 
should freeze to death before we could reach the 
nearest of them. That seems to us an emblem of 
our vain attempts to realize this hidden life. 

Yet this Christian ideal contains nothing im- 
practicable to common men in common life. If 
we have not the faith of martyrs, neither are we 
called to the life of martyrs. The faith practicable 
to us is adequate to the life we are appointed to 
live. The grace and calling balance each other. 

The Rev. William Jay of Bath, England, has 
left on record one of the most healthful reminis- 
cent views of life which it has been my privilege 
to meet with. It is so apt an answer to the ques- 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 259 

tion, u Is life worth living?" and so pertinent an 
offset to the desire for death which some good men 
feel, that it is worth transcribing. After a labori- 
ous pastorate of fifty years, he writes, "I have 
heard many express the sentiment of Cowper, — 

" < Worlds would not bribe me back to tread 
Again life's dreary waste, 
To see the future overspread 
With all the dreary past.' 

Such language is not for me. I should not shrink 
from the prospect of repetition. My duties have 
not been irksome. My trials have been few com- 
pared with my comforts. My condition has been 
the happy medium between poverty and riches. 
I do not believe that in this earth misery prepon- 
derates over good. I have a better opinion of 
mankind than when I began public life : I can not 
ask what is the cause that the former days were 
better than these. I do not believe the fact itself. 
God has not been throwing away duration on the 
human race. The state of the world has been 
improving, is improving. Blessed are our eyes for 
what they see, and our ears for what they hear." 

This is Christian health in an old man's ret- 
rospect of life. It illustrates what Christianity 
can do for a man in forming his judgments of men, 
and bringing him en rapport with the providence 
of God. Such a man can never bury himself in 
monastic meditation upon another man's skull, or 
a morbid longing to get rid of his own. Such a 



260 My Study: and Other Essays. 

man will never ask the question, " Is life worth, 
living?" It is for such men as Voltaire and 
Thomas Paine to cry as they did, " Oh that I had 
never been born ! " For Christian believers re- 
mains the Pauline vision which discloses in both 
worlds such magnificent opportunity to be and to 
do, that we can not make choice between them. 

Say what men may of it, there is such a thing 
as living in sympathy with God. There are men 
who know it. It is the most real thing that is, 
in any man's life. It is the province of Chris- 
tianity to make it a common reality to common 
men. The fruit of it is to make men participants 
of the life that God lives. His will becomes ours T 
His plans ours, His look into the future ours, His 
joys ours. Our whole being is held in trust by 
His eternal choice. The most ignorant and sen- 
suous of us, those of most wooden indurated 
natures, are called of God to this lofty and pure 
alliance. We may become one with Him, as 
Christ was and is. Is not such a life worth 
living? 

Jeremy Taylor, the illustrious preacher at Golden 
Grove, himself a suffering, and sometimes perse- 
cuted, believer, in a sermon on a theme kindred to 
the one before us, after enumerating vividly life's 
trials, says, " They have taken all from me. What 
now? Let me look about me. Unless I list, they 
have not taken away my merry countenance, and 
my cheerful spirit, and my good conscience. They 
still have left me God's providence, and Christ's 



Is the Christian Life Worth Living? 261 

promises, and my religion, and my hopes of Heaven. 
I can delight in all that in which God delights, 
and in God Himself. He that hath so many causes 
of joy, and so great, must be very much in love 
with sorrow, who loses all these treasures, and 
chooses to sit down on his little handful of 
thorns." 



XX. 

A STUDY OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 

PAET I. 

It has been wisely said, that no belief conscien- 
tiously held by large bodies of men, and wrought 
into institutions which have a history, can be 
utterly false. Such is the make of mind as related 
to truth, and of truth as related to mind, that, on 
the large scale, they must discover each other. 

This principle underlies the divisions of the 
Church into denominational sections. Every de- 
nomination is what it is through certain inborn 
affinities, in which it differs from the rest. It rep- 
resents some truth, or phase of truth, or propor- 
tions, shadings, combinations of truth, which other 
denominations do not represent with equal author- 
ity. Every denomination lives, therefore, because 
it must live. In the divine order of things, it has 
a call to live. It is a spoke in the wheel which is 
needful to the completeness of the circle and the 
safety of its revolutions. Every denomination, 
therefore, has its mission. In some things, it is 
wiser than its peers. We lose one of the divinely 
ordained means of Christian culture if we are too 
lofty to learn of each other. 

262 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 263 

The rise of the great Christian sects marks 
epochs in Protestant history. They were the prod- 
ucts of great agitations. Sometimes they were 
signs of great discoveries, for which the world 
was waiting. Again, they indicated great revivals 
of an expiring faith. What would the English- 
speaking churches of to-day have been but for the 
rise of Methodism? Even the secular history of 
England was revolutionized to an extent which 
has molded the destiny of the empire, by the 
rise of the Independents in the Church. 

A friendly study of the Episcopal Church dis- 
closes certain dominant ideas, which we who cher- 
ish Puritan traditions may with profit add to our 
stock of wisdom. One of those ideas is that of 
the dignity of worship. Other denominations are 
its superiors in appreciating the dignity of the 
pulpit. But of Christian worship, no other branch 
of the Church universal has so lofty an ideal as 
the Church of England and its offshoot in this 
country. In all the liturgic literature of our lan- 
guage, nothing equals the Anglican Litany. Its 
variety of thought, its spiritual pathos, its choice 
selection of the most vital themes of prayer, its 
reverent importunity, its theological orthodoxy, 
and its exquisite propriety of style, will commend 
it to the hearts of devout worshipers of many gen- 
erations to come, as they have done to generations 
past. For an equipoise of balanced virtues, it is 
unrivaled. Its union of intensity with simplicity 
will go far to protect its use from the danger 



264 My Study: and Other Essays. 

of formalism, to which all fixed liturgies are 
exposed. 

The liturgic forms of other denominations would 
be saved from some excrescences and inanities if 
the venerable Book of Common Prayer were more 
generally revered as a model. In the stock of 
clerical anecdote, which contributes so largely to 
the comicalities of the newspapers, the infirmities 
of extemporaneous prayer hold an unfortunate pre- 
eminence. Their repellent influence on cultured 
minds is mournful. The growing taste among us 
for responsive worship, and for the alternation of 
prescribed with extemporaneous forms of devotion, 
is a healthful one. With the increase of culture, 
in large communities especially, the demand must 
grow for such improvements upon our ancient 
ways. A valuable portion of the constituency 
most germane to our Puritan churches will seek 
them elsewhere if we do not provide them our- 
selves. 

Nearly allied with an appreciation of the dignity 
of worship, is another idea, in honor of which the 
Church of England sets a commendable example. 
It is that of the sacredness of the House of God. 

Democracy is not friendly to reverence for places. 
Many of our churches are, in this respect, more 
democratic than religious. Our revolt from pil- 
grimages and shrines and sacred relics has swung 
us over to the antipodes, in which we scarcely 
recognize any thing material as more venerable 
than another thing. Science settles the question. 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 265 

Are they not all resolvable into imponderable 
gases ? We are but just beginning to know what 
church architecture is. In one thing, we have 
not outlived the barbarian age. Some among us 
still prefer to see, surmounting our church-spires, 
a horrible satire on our faith, in the form of a 
weather-vane or a cockerel, rather than the golden 
cross, its only proper symbol, if we have any. 

What shall we say of the uses to which we often 
put our places of worship? In rural parishes, 
their doors are often open to town-meetings and 
strolling lecturers. In the vestibule of one church 
was once posted a notice, humbly requesting that 
shells of peanuts and expectorations of tobacco 
should not be left upon the carpeted floor. Not 
long ago a raffle for a sewing-machine was held 
in the auditorium, and the conditions were an- 
nounced glibly from the pulpit. Church-fairs 
around and on the sacramental table are too old 
a story to bear recital. It is a grief to reverent 
taste, that the basements of our sacred edifices 
should be devoted to commercial uses. One in- 
stance I have known, in which worshipers assem- 
bled on the Lord's Day through a darkened passage, 
flanked on either side by a grocery and a provision 
store. The atmosphere they breathed on a Sunday 
morning was redolent with cheese and raw beef. 

The climax of this semi-barbarism was reached 
in a church in the city of Boston. It could not 
be excused on the score of the simplicity of rural 
taste. The pastor and some of his congregation 



266 My Study: and Other Essays. 

were models of refinement and Christian reverence. 
On a sabbath morning in midsummer, the audience 
were mysteriously seized, in the midst of the ser- 
vice of song, with a paroxysm of uncontrollable 
sneezing. First the children, then the choir, and 
at length nearly the whole assembly, the preacher 
included, broke out into that involuntary convul- 
sion which a former president of Harvard College 
once protested that he had not perpetrated in the 
presence of another for seventeen years. It was 
as if they had regaled themselves with the hele- 
niwm autumnale, popularly known as " sneeze-weed." 
Did ever American savage or African Hottentot 
bring such an offering to his gods? When the 
premises were searched by the astounded sexton 
amidst the cachinnations of the boys, the cause of 
the ridiculous catastrophe was found to be a cargo 
of pepper, which, during the previous week, had 
been stored in the cellar. The enterprising trus- 
tees had rented the place to a wholesale grocer. 
They thus eked out the salary of the pastor and 
the wages of the sexton. 

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I 
have been informed of an incident which indicates 
that there is a climax above the " climax." It 
appears that a church in Philadelphia was for sev- 
eral years burdened with current expenses beyond 
receipts ; and, to supply the deficit, the trustees 
leased the basement to a wholesale brewery for the 
storage of beer. A preacher who once occupied 
the pulpit, testifies that the fumes from the beer- 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 267 

barrels were very perceptible to the congregation 
on the Lord's Day. 

There is a certain old Book in which it is 
written, "Incense is an abomination unto Me." 
Was not that prophetic, since prophecy often has 
a double sense, of those Philadelphia beer-barrels? 
One hardly knows whether to condole with, or to 
congratulate, that church, that their economical 
thrift did not save them from bankruptcy. The 
sooner the auctioneer's hammer falls on such an 
edifice, the better. The Lord never owned it : the 
brewer had the better claim. 

Illustrations of this evil multiply ad nauseam. 
In a thriving city of Connecticut, then one of the 
dual capitals of the State, a benevolent tailor — I 
think he was — was once applied to for a subscrip- 
tion to the building of a church. He responded 
with great alacrity. He said that he would give 
the builcling-lot himself. The countenances of the 
committee brightened. He went on to explain, 
saying that he was about to build a new store for 
his increasing business, and that he would build 
one story, and the church was "welcome to all 
above that, upward to Heaven." The usage of the 
churches he was familiar with had not suggested 
to him a doubt that his benevolent offer would be 
gratefully accepted. 

Are such uncivilized associations ever found 
connected with an Episcopal Church? If so, it 
has not been my misfortune to meet them there. 
If, on entering a New-England village, your eye 



268 My Study : and Other Essays. 

falls on a place of worship more comely than the 
rest in architecture, and free from unchurchly 
accompaniments, do you not know, without asking, 
to what denomination of worshipers it belongs? 
Grant that Episcopal usage sometimes crowds its 
churchly reverence to an extreme ; but is not that 
a safer extreme than ours ? We would not imitate 
the scruple of Dr. Johnson, who lifted his hat 
when he passed a church in the street; but we 
would rather do it than to wear the hat from the 
pew to the vestibule. The educating influence of 
this sentiment on children of the Church is of un- 
told value. One of the most difficult of the Chris- 
tian virtues to instill into youthful character is 
that of reverence. The place where God dwells 
is its natural auxiliary. 

The value of the House of the Lord for this 
purpose must increase as our country grows old, 
and its temples of worship become venerable with 
hundreds of years. They should be built, if pos- 
sible, with stone, that they may defy the ravages 
of fire and of time. The recollections of the expe- 
riences of childhood in the House of God may 
then be among the most precious treasures of 
Christian culture. They may come back in after- 
years, " trailing clouds of glory." They make the 
very walls eloquent above all human speech. The 
stone cries out of the wall, and the beam out of 
the timber answers it. That instinct of our na- 
ture which reveres the place where God's honor 
dwells, is no fiction. God has not wrought a false- 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 269 

hood or a frivolity into the very make of the human 
mind in creating it. The intuitions of the race 
have expressed it through all history. 

This reverence for the place where the distance 
seems to be lessened between man and God is 
surely scriptural. Remember Jacob's dream of 
converse with angels, " How dreadful is this place ! 
The Lord is here, and I knew it not ! " Recall the 
night which he spent under the open sky, when in 
his troubled sleep he seemed to wrestle with a 
mysterious stranger, and calls the spot Peniel. 
For he says, " I have seen God face to face ! " 
The biblical narrative of the building of the Tem- 
ple represents it as a place of singular and awful 
sanctity. " I have hallowed this place, to put my 
name there." The House of God must be made 
" exceeding magnifical, of fame and glory through- 
out all countries." The wisest of monarchs sum- 
moned to its erection the most accomplished 
architects of the age. So sacred was it, that it 
must be built without noise. No hammer nor ax, 
nor "any tool of iron," must resound in it. It 
must grow in silence, as the forests grow. 

Such is the Scriptural idea of the holiness of the 
House of the Lord. " The holy place ; the place 
where My honor dwelleth ; the gate of Heaven." 
So the Bible portrays in brief its unutterable sanc- 
tity. Picture a church-fair in the Temple of Jeru- 
salem ! Conceive of a raffle for a gold-headed 
cane, or a Chickering piano, in the " Holy of 
holies ! " Imagine the humdrum of an auction- 



270 My Study: and Other Essays. 

sale of the fag-ends of the fair from the altar of 
sacrifice ! Do not such things remind us of One 
who, on a memorable occasion, found a use for " a 
whip of small cords"? 

The views here advanced must be held within 
bounds. We must not insist on the impracticable. 
Spiritual necessity knows no law of good taste. 
Leeway must be given and taken for the straits 
of pioneer churches in infant settlements. There, 
worshipers have often to remind themselves that 
the Christian Church began in an " upper room." 
It has often sheltered itself in caves and dens, in 
forests and catacombs, and by the sea at low tide. 
It must now often find a temporary home in halls 
and schoolhouses, in log-cabins and barn-lofts. 
One of the most helpful services of an Episcopal 
Church that I ever attended was held in a ball- 
room. In such unchurchly surroundings, a gen- 
uine Church of Christ can compete successfully 
with a corrupt one in gothic cathedrals under a 
vaulted roof, amidst memorial windows and mas- 
sive pillars. Any place is made sacred by the 
worship of the living God by living souls. 

But the thing we plead for is, that, in the older 
settlements, the House of God should be in keep- 
ing with the civilization around it. In cities, where 
all the other tokens of high culture abound, let 
the Christian Temple be "exceeding magnifical." 
In thriving towns, where men build for themselves 
elegant and costly homes, let the home of their 
worship be churchly in itself and its accompani- 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 271 

ments. That is a mistaken economy which would 
retrench expense on the House of the Lord for 
charity's sake. The story of the alabaster box 
settles that question for all time. Nothing is 
extravagant which is honestly expended for the 
love of Christ. 

We have something yet to learn of the rudiments 
of biblical worship. Our Episcopal brethren are 
farther advanced than we in this line of Christian 
culture. That is a becoming, because a natural 
and sensible, act of reverence, in which they begin 
and end the services of public worship by kneeling, 
or bowing the head in silent prayer. Their bishops 
exercise a most valuable authority in withholding 
consecration from a church burdened with debt. 
They are right in refusing to offer to the Most 
High a treasure over which the auctioneer's 
hammer is suspended. 

That was a refined Christian feeling, whatever 
may be said of it as a sanitary error, which led 
our fathers to bury their dead, and erect tombs 
for themselves, underneath the temples in which 
they and their godly ancestry had worshiped, or, 
better still, in the cheerful " God's acre " around 
them. They would be at hand when the morning 
dawned. Reason about the theology of it as we 
may, who can help sympathizing with the senti- 
ment? The man who can stand in the Campo 
Santo at Pisa, only to jeer at the faith which has 
transported thither earth from the Holy Land to 
create a resting-place for the dead, is none the 



272 My Study: and Other Essays. 

better for it. Many things which we would not 
do now, we may well respect in the usage of a 
former age. They may be things which, in other 
forms, ought to perpetuate their spiritual meaning 
in this brazen age of ours. 



XXI. 

A STUDY OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 
PART n. 

The Church of England, and the American off- 
shoot from it, have been wisely conservative of 
one idea, to which our Puritan traditions are not 
very friendly, and yet which, for that reason, we 
greatly need to incorporate into our ideal of the 
Christian Church. It is that of the unity, and the 
consequent moral authority, of the Church. We 
have drifted to a perilous extreme in our passion- 
ate zeal for individuality in religious life. It often 
degenerates into individualism. Then the sequence 
is inevitable, that eccentric and crochety believers, 
and unbelievers as well, who can find a home 
nowhere else, steal one from a Congregational 
Church. This is vanity and vexation of spirit. 
We have contended, not too stoutly perhaps, but 
altogether too singly, for the liberty of a church, 
as contrasted with the authority of the Church. 
Our inherited faith, in this respect, is truthful; 
but it is not all the truth. A principle lies over 
against it. That principle our Lord hallowed in 
the closing scenes of his life : " That they all may 
be oneP 273 



274 My Study: and Other Essays. 

By just so much, as we undervalue churchly 
unity, do we lose our sense of churchly authority. 
There is a moral power which nothing else creates 
in numbers compacted and unified. This power is 
the legitimate prerogative of the Church of Christ. 
A church can possess but an infinitesimal fraction 
of it, and that often infinitesimal in results. But 
the Church, the temple of the Spirit of God, is 
well-nigh omnipotent. In no other development 
is the principle absolutely true, " Vox populi vox 
Dei." Our plans of church extension suffer for 
the want of the unifying principle as a check upon 
disintegration. In the moral as in the material 
universe, there are twin forces of centripetal and 
centrifugal attraction. Either alone works ruin : 
both in union create order and beauty. 

The Church of England does good service for 
us all in conserving this churchly idea without 
crowding it to the tyranny of the Romish hie- 
rarchy. After all that we have said, and must say 
to every generation, in resistance to ecclesiastical 
despotism, there is, even in ecclesiastical despotism, 
an underlying truth which no large body of be- 
lievers can afford to part with. Divine life is con- 
centrated in one true and living Church. That 
article in the Apostle's Creed, " I believe in the 
Holy Catholic Church," has more than apostolic 
authority. It is the word of God. It represents 
the power which is to convert this world to Christ. 

When this idea of churchly authority is pre- 
sented in its biblical simplicity, the common sense 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 275 

of men approves it. Under right conditions, the 
world reveres it. On a certain occasion, an im- 
mense meeting of Chartists was held in London. 
They had been wrought up almost to ferocity by 
the atheistic abuse which had been heaped upon 
the Christianity of the ag£. Charles Kingsley 
made his way through the crowd to the platform ; 
and, folding his arms till he could command a hear- 
ing, he uttered these simple words, "lama clergy- 
man of the Church of England and — a Chartist." 
The bold committal of the Church to the welfare 
of the laboring people awed the angry assembly 
into silence. Their ears were open to any thing 
which the athletic churchman could say to them. 
He corrected them, rebuked them, proved their 
mistakes, denounced their vices, heaped scorn upon 
their crimes, and flung the gauntlet to their un- 
godly leaders ; and they listened to it all like chil- 
dren. They felt that he had the right to say it, 
as no other man than a Christian minister could 
have. He spoke as one having authority. Behind 
his words and him was the great body of Chris- 
tian believers of all ages, which Christ had hal- 
lowed by His own name. 

It is almost impossible to overestimate the pres- 
tige which this churchly idea has given to the 
Church of England in the civilization of the Eng- 
lish people. With all its defects, — and honest 
churchmen know that these are not few nor small, 
— still that church has more to show than any 
other Protestant sect, of humble, effective service 



276 My Study : and Other Essays. 

in humanizing, comforting, educating, Christian- 
izing, the masses of the English people. I have 
mentioned the name of Charles Kingsley. He is as 
good a representative as any one of hundreds of 
others, of a self-denying country-parson, consecrat- 
ed to his work as a minister of God to the poor 
and the lowly. Where can we find a better model ? 

But for the spiritual elements which the Church 
has built into the foundations of the English Gov- 
ernment, that government could not exist a year. 
We democrats marvel at the loyalty of the Eng- 
lish people to a system of government which is 
unequal, unnatural, in some respects tyrannical. 
To our sharp republican eye, they appear stupid in 
their blind allegiance. But it is no mystery when 
we give due weight to one thing. Every English- 
man from his infancy upward has heard prayers 
offered for the queen, the royal family, and the 
parliament of the realm. The government is asso- 
ciated with all that he reveres as the representative 
of God. That infinite idea which the word " Law " 
embodies, exists in the concrete to an English- 
man's conscience, as it seldom does to that of a 
republican. Loyalty is a more profound sentiment 
than mere submission. At the bottom, it is a reli- 
gious sentiment. It is the voice of conscience. 

This it is which has kept alive the English Gov- 
ernment, though rocking on the billows of threat- 
ened revolution, for a thousand years. And it is 
the work of the English Church. It is not easy 
for men to lay violent hands on that for which 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 277 

they have been praying all their life long. Some 
element must be eliminated from their life-blood 
before they will do it. It is like the death-blow of 
a parricide upon his mother. I repeat, the princi- 
ple of reverence runs through the warp and woof 
of England's civilization, and her ancient church 
has put it there. She owes it to the poor, burnt 
hand of Cranmer. With all her national defects 
and follies and crimes, England is a blessing to the 
world. That will be a sad day for mankind when 
she falls, if fall she must, from the summit of 
nations. It is not yet proved that we of the new 
world have any thing to offer which can take her 
place as a civilizing and Christianizing power to 
the nations. And, if we have, the best of it is 
our inheritance from England. We are but a 
New England in our mission to the world. We 
are but the offspring of a venerable Mother : our 
churches are but the offshoots of the Mother- 
church. The churchly idea is as necessary to us 
as to her. 

True, the idea of the individuality of the soul, 
which it has been our mission to develop, is 
equally potent. We will not be faithless to it. 
But, in our zeal for it, we have been too oblivious 
of the twin-idea represented by the church as a 
unit. These two ideas are correlatives. Either 
works ruin without the other. The churchly sen- 
timent has special power in the forming of pop- 
ular opinions. It is a most essential force in every 
wise reform. Rid it of the pettiness of formalism, 



278 My Study: and Other Essays. 

and the abuses of despotism, and the craft of 
priesthood, and it is the most potent lever of re- 
form that history has known. The world will 
never be truly reformed till it is converted to 
Christ ; and it will never be converted to Christ, 
except by means and methods which bring to the 
front the Church of Christ. Christ lives in his 
Church. Every generation creates its voluntary 
organizations, which aim to do the work, and rep^ 
resent the principles, for which the Church exists ; 
but they all work at disadvantage, because they 
do not represent Christ. In the end, they all be^ 
come effete, and pass away. The Church is the 
only representative of associated and compacted 
benevolence which has a destiny of conquest. 

The Church of England, furthermore, does good 
service in the conservation of the idea of the his- 
toric continuity of the Church. We can not defer 
to her claim of apostolic succession as any more 
valid than our own. Yet in her articles of faith, 
and in her forms of worship, as well as in her years, 
she represents a venerable and eventful history. 
Institutions are strong which are built into ages 
of accumulated growth and achievement. Human 
nature everywhere has roots in the past. We all 
have historic feelers, which reach out, like the ten- 
drils of a vine, for something to lay hold of, and 
to steady our faith. A thing is presumptively 
true if it is old. A faith which has been handed 
down through ages of inquiry has solidity in the 
very fact of its endurance. Nothing else tries a 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 279 

truth, a book, an institution, a system, a man, as 
time does. Any thing that has lived long, has so 
far proved its right to live. 

This principle has special pertinence in matters 
of religion. To religious institutions, time is a 
hint of eternity. A creed which remote ages 
originated, and have sent down to later days, must 
have in it central truths which the world needs. 
A Church which dates back for its beginning to 
the Abrahamic pilgrimage is venerable for its 
power of continuance. Its longevity is a history. 
The spirit of worship is deepened by the use of 
liturgic forms, in which holy men and women of 
other generations have expressed their faith. It 
is a most formative element in the religious culture 
of children, that they are taught to pray in the 
words which a godly ancestry have hallowed. To 
offer the prayers which their fathers offered, and 
to sing the hymns which their mothers sang, will 
set going sanctifying influences which will grow 
with their growth. 

Will not the use of ancient forms degenerate 
into nothing but form? Always possibly; never 
necessarily. I seriously question whether such 
repetition induces any more formality than the 
silent attempt of listeners to follow the im- 
promptu thought of a leader in extemporaneous 
prayer. Prayer impromptu may be the superior 
to the leader ; but, to the hearer, the following is 
a difficult and complicated act. Such prayer to 
the hearer is a series of surprises. It requires a 



280 My Study: and Other Essays. 

quick mind to follow it with no loss of devotional 
sincerity. To children it is commonly a dead loss 
of time. They do not participate in it, and are 
not reverently interested in it. During the first 
fifteen years of a child's life, the public devotions 
of our churches are generally a blank. 

Try the experiment with an intelligent child 
of eight years. Ask him what he was thinking of 
during the "long prayer." I venture to think you 
will be startled by the answer, for the evidence 
it will give you, that, for any religious value of 
the service to him, he might as well have been 
on the playground. Is this the best we can do to 
make our sanctuaries contribute to the religious 
culture of our children? 

But, granting the peril of formality in the use 
of an ancient liturgy, the form which ages have 
sanctified can not lose all its sacredness in the use. 
Probably the peril is nowhere greater than among 
a crowd of college-students. Yet in Oriel College, 
England, the same form, in part, is in use to-day 
that was there five hundred years ago. A recent 
visitor testifies that it is rehearsed with apparent 
reverence. That must be a brutish mind which 
could rehearse it otherwise. Is the man living, 
who was taught to repeat the Lord's Prayer at 
five years of age, who can gabble it at the age of 
fifty? John Quincy Adams, in his eighty-fourth 
year, repeated every night the old stanza of infant- 
worship, — 

"Now I lay me down to sleep," etc. 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 281 

I have recently heard it said, that, -as the air of 
"Home, Sweet Home" is the most memorable 
music in the world for its power over the human 
mind, this praj-er of infancy is the most memor- 
able poetry. One can well believe it. This and 
the Lord's Prayer have been the most potent 
educators of infancy and childhood that the world 
has known. If places are revered for their anti- 
quity, and their association with the great and good 
of other times, much more is the language sacred 
in which they have communed with God. 

This reverence for historic continuity as a factor 
in religious culture is developed in no other Prot- 
estant sect so profoundly as in the Church of 
England. By her fidelity to it, she does good 
service to the Church of the future. The only 
thing in which other denominations cultivate it 
largely is their hymnology. But why should we 
not foster it in the service of prayer, as well as in 
the service of song? We teach our children to 
pray in the words of the Lord's Prayer. Why 
should we stop there in our recognition of the fact 
that prayer has a history ? Might not our worship 
be enriched by sometimes using the prayers of 
Chrysostom and St. Augustine and Jeremy Tay- 
lor? We sing the hymn of St. Bernard: why not 
pray his prayer as well ? 

One other element of religious life, for which 
we have reason to respect the Anglican Church, is 
that of order in religious observances, and a con- 
sequent distaste for reckless change. This ten- 



282 My Study: and Other Essays. 

dency easily runs to the extreme. A Church 
is unfaithful to the chief end of its being if it is 
nothing but a conservative machine. Its vener- 
able liturgy is an abomination if it is the service 
of a treadmill. Yet the taste which is thus abused 
is indispensable to permanent religious growth. 
There is no conservative power without it. We 
are creatures of routine in religion, as in other 
things. The Scriptures recognize this; and Nature 
indorses it, in the institution of the sabbath. Even 
the animal world echoes, in its dumb way, this 
demand of human nature. Our beasts of burden 
fail us before the time if we deny them their 
sabbaths. Life itself is distributed by sevens. 
The stellar universe is engineered on a sublime 
system of routine, more exact than clockwork. 
Besides, duties which have to do with God, surely 
require to be performed with reverent decency; 
and to this, fixedness of succession and recurrence 
is auxiliary. The foundation for it is built deep 
in the constitution of mind. 

Episcopal usage, in this respect, though to the 
taste of many it is too restrictive of individual lib- 
erty, yet to as many more is helpful and strength- 
ening. In periods of religious disorder, when zeal 
runs away with wisdom, we find reason to prize 
the help of Episcopal conservatism and propriety. 
A reverent faith at such times always leans that 
way. The late Rev. Dr. Hawes of Hartford was, 
by temperament and training, a Puritan of the 
Puritans. The athletic and progressive virtues of 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 283 

his Puritan ancestry were as innate in his blood 
as in theirs. Yet at a time of religious efferves- 
cence in Connecticut, when zeal ran riot, even to 
profaneness, he said, " I thank God for the exist- 
ence of the Episcopal Church." We all have 
reason for the same thank-offering, when popular 
reverence is overborne by religious frenzy. 

This suggestion is the more significant because 
of our denominational faith in revivals of religion. 
We believe in revivals. Our history is full of 
them. Our great preachers have been honored of 
God in great awakenings of religious life. Our 
theory of preaching is adjusted to the quickening 
of great assemblies by the Spirit of God. The 
history of New England especially has been illu- 
mined by days of Pentecost on which her pulpit 
has spoken as with tongues of flame. 

One consequence of a great history is the dan- 
ger of an extreme. The better the thing, the more 
open is it to abuse. Our Puritan denominations 
have sometimes encountered the peril of too exclu- 
sive reliance on revivals for church-extension. 
Imperfect education in the ministry tends to wild 
and wasteful ways in the conduct of revivals. 
We need the balancing weight of more conserva- 
tive tastes. 

We can not follow the lead of the Episcopal 
Church in this thing with unqualified trust. We 
should be false to the divine providence in our his- 
tory if we should do that. Yet with entire fidel- 
ity to our own traditions, we may wisely learn 



284 My Study: and Other Essays. 

something from Episcopal faith in ancient ways. 
We can use more faithfully the principle of Chris- 
tian nurture in the training of our children. We 
can arrest the decline of infant baptism with the 
whole train of duties and privileges which it 
involves. We can assume in our system of activ- 
ities that the children of the Church shall be 
worthy of her full membership in the natural order 
of religious growth. The form of Episcopal " con- 
firmation" is not essential, but the thing it sig- 
nifies is so. We need it. We should abandon the 
theory of despair, that children must for a time be 
reprobates, and then be converted by convulsive 
revolution. That theory is of Satanic origin. 

We can set a guard also more faithfully against 
the abuses of revivals. We can keep our pulpits 
out of the hands of ignorant or half-educated 
men. If our polity is not such that it can protect 
our churches from the inroad of unworthy pastors, 
we should create a polity that will. We can give 
the place which of right belongs to them, to men 
of cultured minds and refined tastes, and not com- 
pel such men to take back seats in our churches. 
Our ways of doing things would be improved by 
such precautions and safeguards. We can even 
afford to make some sacrifice of numbers to im- 
proved quality. Some ways of doing things which 
are popular among us we should silently lay aside. 

In our Puritan communion, there are other ideas 
than those here enumerated, which are too valua- 
ble to permit us to leave the Church of our fathers 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 285 

in search of wisdom. We will rather import what 
we need than to exile ourselves. We are more 
than pardonable if we believe, that, on the whole, 
we should suffer loss if we should exchange our 
own for any other of the great Churches of 
Christendom. We confess to a childlike clinging 
to the Church of the Pilgrims. When we see 
what it has made New England, and what it has 
achieved for our country and for the world, we 
can not help feeling as De Quincey did, in view of 
the religious history of England, "I thank God 
that I am the child of a magnificent Church." 
Our Pilgrim faith surely has more than a " magni- 
ficent " history. Oh those grand, lofty, unworldly 
souls ! How lordly were their aspirations, yet 
how childlike their trust ! How profound was 
their sense of eternity, and how close their ap- 
proach to God ! They are sacred to us above all 
earthly fame. Princes of blood royal were they 
all. We say of our Jerusalem, " If I forget thee, 
may my right hand forget her cunning ! " The 
child who is born to such a faith, should give to it 
the strength of his manhood, and die in it at the 
end exultingly. 

This, like all rules governing a life's choices, 
must be held with elasticity enough to enclose 
exceptional cases. Denominational affinities are, 
in part, matters of temperament. There is an 
Episcopal temperament, as there is a Methodist 
temperament. There are men who, though born 
under Puritan constellations, are born churchmen. 



286 My Study: and Other Essays. 

Not their tastes only, not their acquired convic- 
tions chiefly, but their inmost spiritual structure, 
inclines them to conservative opinions and fixed 
liturgic forms. They take in more spiritual vital- 
ity from an Episcopal atmosphere than from any 
other. Such men should be allowed to follow the 
bent of their natures without restrictive criticism. 
Let them go where those who are born Puritans 
can not follow them. In the exercise of the same 
liberty, let the vast majority of men of the Puritan 
make count it their honor to abide by the faith 
and polity of their fathers. 

Very significant testimony to this effect was once 
uttered by that accomplished scholar and model 
churchman, the Rev. Dr. Washburn of New York. 
If I do not mistake, he was born in New England, 
and passed his youth in a Congregational church. 
In early manhood he took orders in the Episcopal 
Church, and became one of the brilliant ornaments 
of her pulpit. It could have been no want of suc- 
cess in his life's work which led him to say to me 
near the close of his life, "My experience and 
observation have led me to the conviction that a 
young man of Protestant training had better stay 
in the Church in which God has given him birth." 
Much as he loved the Church of his adoption, and 
proud as she was of him, he thought, that, as a 
rule, the gain from the transition was not sufficient 
to warrant so grave a change. 

As a rule, then, we of Puritan antecedents can 
have no inducement, on the whole, to abandon our 



A Study of the Episcopal Church. 287 

birthright. But we may enrich it, and augment 
the resources of our religious culture, by studying 
the ideas, and importing some of the usages, of the 
old Mother Church of England. 



XXII. 
PRAYER AS A STATE OF CHRISTIAN LIVING. 

Prayeb, in real life is an object of discovery and 
surprises. Said one believer, " I had been a long 
time in the Church, before I found out that prayer 
is something which one can make a business of." 
A growing experience of the divine life will con- 
stantly discover something new in prayer as a 
moral force. Three stages of growth are com- 
monly discernible respecting it in the Christian 
consciousness. They are, prayer as a refuge in 
emergencies, prayer as a habit at appointed times, 
and prayer as a state of continuous living. 

The privilege and power of prayer in this last 
development of it are realized by comparatively 
few. It was one of the infrequent expressions of 
his inner life by the late Professor Stuart, " I have 
learned that the value of prayer does not depend 
so much on its intensity in moods, or its regularity 
in times, as on its constancy as a continuous way 
of living. We need to live in a state of prayer." 
I quote his remark substantially from memory. 
Suffering had taught him the truth of it. Few 
men reach the discovery, except through some 
sort of disciplinary trial. In spiritual experience, 

288 



Prayer as a State df Christian Living. 289 

necessity is the mother of discovery, as it is of 
invention in material things. 

Our fathers, especially of the earlier generations 
in this country, seem to have understood this 
phase of prayer more profoundly than we do. 
They understood it in a more practical way. They 
prayed for what they wanted, and they expected 
to receive it. If they did not receive it, the fail- 
ure set them upon great "searchings of heart." 
The result commonly was, that they prayed again. 
They had faith in importunity. They noted the 
fact, that the promise, " Ask and ye shall receive," 
was given in immediate sequence to a parable 
which represents a failure in prayer. 

There is something sublime in their application 
of prayer to the common exigencies of life. Look 
at the records of the ancient Courts of Probate 
in New England. How did their Wills read? 
First and above all, "I commit my soul to the 
Infinite and Almighty God ! " So they were wont 
to go about the work of setting their house in 
order for their last journey. Look at their reli- 
gious diaries. They are childlike in the devotional 
faith they record. The writers take God into their 
confidence as a Friend. They make their business 
His business. If one of them moves to a new home, 
he leaves the old one, and consecrates the new one, 
with prayer. If he buys a house or a horse, he 
prays over his bargain. A harvest, a journey, a 
" cold spell," a dry summer, an autumnal freshet, 
— the things which make up the talk of a country 



290 My Study: and Other Essays. 

village, — make up also the converse of good men 
with God. Their faith was not restricted to Sun- 
days and sermons, to funerals and epidemics. 

The articles of their daily food are, each one, a 
gift of God, for which thanksgiving is prompt. 
Many times in the history of those days is the 
gift of Indian corn gratefully acknowledged. It 
was a new esculent to them, of ready and abun- 
dant growth ; and it often saved them from starva- 
tion. The pious chronicler of the early days of 
Concord writes, " The Lord is pleased to provide 
great store of fish in the spring-time." Again, he 
records, " Let no man make a jest of pumpkins ; 
for, with this fruit, the Lord was pleased to feed 
His people till their corn and cattle were increased." 

In such familiar uses of religion, there is always 
danger of twaddle. But nothing of that sort mars 
the manliness of the olden times. Religion was 
admirably weighted with good sense. It made a 
compound of tough, practical fiber. One of the 
ancient customs was, to invite the minister to 
come and ask the divine blessing on the land of 
the farmer. "Blessing the land," it was called. 
A clergyman once, on being called thus to visit a 
farm on Cape Cod, found it in a miserable plight 
for the want of good husbandry. " No," said he, 
"this land does not need prayer : it needs manure." 
Such were the homely and sensible ways in which 
the Most High was welcomed to their plain and 
frugal homes. Was ever Wordsworth's "plain liv- 
ing and high thinking " more grandly illustrated? 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 291 

Even the comic side of prayer, in certain condi- 
tions, did not escape them, yet did not disturb 
them. A hundred years ago a good citizen of 
Sudbury attended the " Thursday Lecture " in 
Boston, and heard the preacher pray for rain. At 
the close of the service he took the preacher's 
hand, and said, " You Boston ministers, as soon as 
a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church, 
and pray for rain till all Sudbury and Concord are 
under water." It was comical, and they both saw 
it. But, none the less, they believed, that, if good 
men prayed for rain, they got rain. Failure was 
only a reason for praying again. It was very 
unscientific. Be it so ; but a grand fact which 
underlies science was expressed in it. The grand- 
est life man can live was in it, settle it with science 
as we may. 

This profound faith in prayer as a constant 
accompaniment of life was the secret of the ex- 
treme length of the prayers of our fathers. They 
often interpreted literally the command, " Continue 
in prayer." Their ministers sometimes indulged 
in such prolixity of devotion, that, if one of their 
successors should imitate them now on a Sunday, 
his congregation would ask for his resignation on 
Monday. It was because, as a rule, they succeeded 
in it. Prayer was the most effective force they 
knew. It swayed the universe. They knew noth- 
ing of power in steam, except to raise the lids of 
their teakettles. They did not know lightning by 
the name of electricity. They did not know that 



292 My Study : and Other Essays. 

gravitation held their feet to the ground, and that, 
without its permission, they could not weigh a 
pound of sugar, or adjust their knee-buckles. The 
Corliss engine and the Cunarders and Hoe's print- 
ing-press were not. If they* had been predicted, 
they would have been treated like the " moon- 
hoax " of later days. The telephone would have 
savored of witchcraft to them. They would have 
kept a fast-day before using it. But they knew 
prayer as the superlative of all forces. They used 
it in good faith. 

They prayed long, therefore, because it was 
their way of accomplishing their objects. Objects 
which, in their theory of life, ranked first in value, 
they could achieve in no other way. In vulgar par- 
lance, " it paid " to pray. They never heard the 
Italian proverb, — or, if they did, they heard only 
to scorn it, — " If you would succeed, you must not 
be too good." To their notion, goodness was the 
prime success. Every thing they did, therefore, 
they baptized with prayer. Where Lord Nelson 
would have broken a bottle of brandy over the 
prow of a ship at the launch, they would have sent 
for the minister to offer a prayer for safe sailing. 
Their praying was the best half of their doing. 

" Father Wilson " of the First Church of Boston 
often prayed two hours continuously. Men came 
in from Dedham to hear his prayers, as they now 
do to hear Phillips Brooks's sermons. They used 
to caution each other not to ask him to pray for a 
thing unless they were prepared to have it with all 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 293 

its corollaries and implications. Once, at least, 
he was begged to cease praying for rain, because, 
since lie began, some of the neighboring towns had 
been flooded. Science may say what it will, or 
can, of these things. But there was a real life in 
them. Nothing was more real in those heroic times. 
The revolution for independence was not a more 
efficient factor in the world's destiny than the 
power of prayer which was put into history by 
those grand believers. After all, it is faith in the 
unseen that sways the world. 

Here, also, was the secret of their resolute and 
cheerful temper. It is an egregious mistake to 
paint them as men of disconsolate conscience. 
That they were sour-faced men, is as much a 
fiction as the "Blue Laws." Mr. Emerson thus 
describes them: "A sadness as of piled mountains 
fell on them. Life became ghastly, joyless, a pil- 
grim's progress, . . . beleagured round with doleful 
histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us, with 
doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before 
us ; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the 
listener sank within them." This is the heredi- 
tary notion of the Pilgrims. It goes down from 
father to son, bulging with accumulating lies, as it 
advances, till its figure has become hideous. 

Never was there a more stupid blunder in the 
judgment of historic characters. They were not 
such men. Jeremiah, the prophet of the broken 
heart, was not their model: St. Paul was their 
model. Their ministers preached a score of ser- 



294 My Study: and Other Essays. 

mons on the Epistles to the Romans to one on 
the books of the " weeping prophet." Their minds 
were freighted with great convictions. They lived 
in the rapids of great events. Their piety was 
sympathetic with both. Such piety is always of 
the resolute and cheering type. 

It has been said, that no man can be a true poet 
who has not a cheerful temper. It is more strictly 
true, that no man can be a Christian of the Pilgrim 
type without such a temper. No man or woman, 
without such a temper, could have lived through 
the first winter at Plymouth after the landing in 
1620. Such believers live in light, not in twilight. 
They may not be hilarious men, but they have and 
give the good cheer of indomitable courage. Our 
fathers, especially of the earlier generations, were 
men of that guild. They were men of the meridian 
and the morning. 

It is not given to men of " ghastly, joyless life," 
whose minds are intent on " purgatorial and penal 
fires," to do the deeds our fathers did. Downcast 
and sour-faced men, weighed down by " a sadness 
as of piled mountains," are not the men who build 
States, and emancipate nations. Men who walk 
with eyes on the ground, "with hearts sinking 
within them," do not found colleges in their 
poverty, when the gift of a bushel of corn is a 
sacrifice. They do not form churches, and free 
governments, which illuminate the globe in after- 
times. It takes stalwart and uplooking faith to 
make history. Such men were the fathers. If 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 295 

they observed more fast-days than we do, they 
observed more days of thanksgiving as well, and 
did it more religiously. There is not in the 
world's history an institution which blends a pro- 
found piety with social festivity more beautifully 
than the New-England Thanksgiving Day of the 
olden time. That and the English Christmas are 
twin products of a cheerful religious faith. 

Our fathers prayed more in every way than we 
do. If they had personal conflicts with Satan, 
they conducted them in a soldierly way. They 
fought like men who meant to win. They did 
win. If they hanged witches, they did it in dead 
earnest, believing that they were in conscious con- 
flict with the Devil. They grappled with the arch- 
enemy with stout heart, where many of our day, 
with the same faith in malign powers, would have 
run away. They were born conquerors, and they 
had the reward of conquest. They lived, in the 
main, a life of victory and of gladness. The fact 
is, that, like all successful men in the tug of life, 
they had no time to mope ; and they had as little 
disposition as time. 

But the grand secret of their gladsome courage 
was the state of prayer in which they lived. They 
had faith that whatever ought to interest them did 
interest God. Whatever ought to engage their 
faculties, and fill up their life, did engage the per- 
fections of God. They were the subject of divine 
decrees. God had ordained from eternity what- 
soever should come to pass, and had elected them 



296 My Study: and Other Essays. 

to be His instruments in bringing things to pass. 
They were co-workers with God, and could not be 
overreached or defeated in life's work. Reverently 
they talked with God as with a Friend. Theirs 
was the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. 
Therefore they enjoyed God. If ever men lived, 
who, in the sense of lofty courageous hope, enjoyed 
life, they were such men. 

Prayer as a state of holy living is abundantly 
recognized in the Scriptures. " Continuing instant 
in prayer." " In every thing by prayer, let your 
requests be made known." " Continue in prayer, 
and watch." " Praying always with all prayer and 
supplication." Such fragments come to view in 
the Bible, like the edges of geologic strata on the 
surface of the earth, signs of the deep creation 
underneath. Anna continued all night in prayer. 
St. Paul's model of a Christian widow was one 
who lived in prayer night and day. St. Peter in 
prison was remembered by the church in prayer 
without ceasing. Far back in the elder dispensa- 
tion, prayer as a continuity of exalted privilege 
dawned on the Psalmist's mind. In a tone of tri- 
umph he sings, "At evening and morning and 
noon will I pray." Constancy of devotional spirit 
is inborn in the nature of holy living. One age 
has handed it down to another in the line of bib- 
lical revelation. 

Such continuity of devotional habit gives large 
place in a godly life to ejaculatory prayer. St. 
Augustine, Madame Guyon, John Tauler, Luther, 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 297 

President Edwards, Edward Payson, and a host of 
others, were often overheard in fragmentary col- 
loquy with God. Professor Stuart used to hallow 
his learned researches by interspersing audibly 
chants of the Psalms in the original Hebrew. On 
one occasion, in taking his morning walk, he ob- 
served in a door-yard as he passed it, a rare and 
beautiful specimen of a French dahlia. He paused ; 
and, leaning over the fence, he was heard ejaculat- 
ing in low tones his thanksgiving for such an im- 
pressive proof of the benevolence of God. 

Such moments of holy utterance were the feed- 
ers which gave to these men their spiritual strength. 
Who can tell how much they owed even of their 
intellectual vigor to such spiritual resources ? Ev- 
ery faculty of a good man's mind receives incre- 
ment from his virtues. Gifts grow on the strength 
of graces. Zinzendorf used to write little notes 
to "the Lord Christ." This is what every reli- 
gious diary ought to be. No human eye but that 
of the author should ever see it. Thomas a Kem- 
pis says of Christ, " He alone is a world of friends. 
That man never knew what it was to be familiar 
with God, who complains of the want of friends 
while God is with him." 

We need the state of prayer as a counteracting 
force to the state of temptation in which we are 
always living. In such a world as this, life itself 
is one long temptation. The defense needs to be 
proportionate to the peril. The spirit of our age 
is skeptical of the reality of Satan. Few of us 



298 My Study: and Other Essays. 

have the vivid faith which our fathers had in his 
personality as the chief of a malignant empire. 
We have reason to believe his subject angels to be 
a great multitude. A " legion " of them once held 
possession of one soul. They give to temptation 
a fearful force and perilous ubiquity. We have to 
contend with principalities and powers. No man 
is beyond the reach of their malign enchantments. 
Here, there, and everywhere, now, then, and 
always, personal and mighty foes are at hand to 
allure men to ruin. If spiritual attributes give 
any advantage over minds enclosed in fleshly forms, 
tempters have that advantage in this world of ours. 
We do not know that they ever slumber, or are 
ever absent. That saintly woman was a wise one 
who taught her children to take example from the 
Devil as the most industrious being in the created 
universe. There is but one refuge for a mortal 
man living under such conditions of spiritual trial. 
It is to live in a state of prayer as constant as the 
peril. God has ordained no other means by which 
we can summon from unseen worlds spiritual allies 
to re-enforce our conflict with spiritual foes. 

Luther may have had an exaggerated estimate 
of the attributes of Satan, and of his liberty of 
access to human souls. His imagination realized 
the presence of the Adversary in visible and audi- 
ble signs. He heard voices threatening or seduc- 
tive over his left shoulder. " Ha ! you are there, 
— are you?" was the salutation he once gave, in 
response to an evil thought which he believed to 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 299 

be a suggestion from the Devil. His vision of 
Satan in his cell at Erfurt, when he threw his ink- 
stand at him, may have been, probably was, a 
strained and unnatural fancy, yet possibly not. 
The Reformer lived in an age when Satan was at 
large in great liberty. Abnormal manifestations 
of his presence may have been becoming to the 
crisis, as they seem to have been in our Saviour's 
lifetime, and as in the judgment of some they are 
now, in some of the phenomena of spiritualism. 
At all events, Luther's extreme, if it was such, 
was a safer error than the incredulous security 
from malign enchantments in which men of our 
times are living. Spiritual perils are the more 
fatal for being unseen and unheard. Odorless 
malaria is the most destructive to life. Burglars 
enter our homes in velvet slippers, and in the dark. 
Their dark-lanterns do not waken us from our 
slumber, though held at our bedside. So do in- 
visible tempters creep stealthily upon us and 
around us, night and day. Our unbelief in their 
existence is their safety from detection. Every 
man has an unseen enemy at his left shoulder. 
Better is Luther's credulity than our dead faith. 
Such a continuous state of peril demands a con- 
tinuous state of prayer as its offset and counter- 
action. 

We need the state of prayer also as a corrective 
of the restlessness and turmoil which life in this 
world engenders. Our life is full of distractions 
from spiritual peace. We call God our Father. 



300 My Study : and Other Essays. 

He is a wise Father; He does not cosset His child; 
He inclines rather to the robust discipline. Life 
to many of us has a good deal of rough experience, 
like that of the backwoods. We often find our- 
selves in tumultuous agitations which seem to for- 
bid communion with God. Emerson says that 
u the human race are afflicted with St. Vitus' 
dance. A man acts, not from one motive, but 
from many shifting fears and short motives. It is 
as if he were ten or twenty less men than himself, 
acting at discord with one another; so that the 
result of most lives is zero." 

Is it so ? Where, then, shall we find the unify- 
ing force ? How shall we obtain concinnity and a 
purpose? How otherwise than by coming into 
God's atmosphere, and living at one with Him? 
Only so shall we emancipate ourselves from the 
thralldom of anxieties and vacillations which take 
all joy out of life. So shall a great peace come to 
us. Not the most gifted, but the most godly, know 
most of this. 

Often it is a discovery to us that the consistence 
of our character can not stand the strain of pro- 
longed disease. Our best resolves give way before 
physical pain. The four walls of a sick-room are 
like those of the prison so contrived that one of 
them approached its opposite on rollers a foot in a 
day till it crushed the prisoner. Death found him 
a raving maniac. The monotony of a hopeless 
sick-room is intolerable to one not inured to it by 
long discipline. Surprises of evil overcome us in 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 301 

hours of nervous prostration. The first thing that 
disclosed to Dr. Chalmers the futility of the moral- 
ism which was all the religion he had when he 
began his pastorate at Kilmany, was the discovery 
that it could not bear the scrutiny of the sick-bed. 
When brought face to face with death, he found 
out his need of something better than scientific 
culture to give him rest. 

Rest in God is the great necessity of our nature 
when any thing brings a strain upon the fiber of 
our moral being. Sin tends always to unrest. It 
often creates tumults of conflict, and shocks of self- 
discovery. A keen conscience is an alert foe to 
peace of mind, unless it is appeased by something 
which brings the soul into sympathy with God in 
its choices. The complacency of God is the only 
thing that can give a man complacency in himself. 
Unsettled questions of duty, also, often create 
perturbations and alarms. Doubts of truth in 
some minds open abysses of despair. Such are 
contingencies in even a good man's life of proba- 
tionary discipline. 

Even the innocent cares of life are not always 
innocent of encroachment on mental rest. Those 
which Montgomery calls " the insect cares," some- 
times are so numerous, that, like an atmosphere 
full of stinging creatures, they make life a burden. 
The shame a man feels for his minding them is 
itself a discomfort. Pascal lamented, that, in cer- 
tain moods, he could not bear the alighting of a fly 
on his face without irritation. One godly man 



302 My Study: and Other Essays. 

wept because lie lost his self-control, and swore 
profanely at the sting of a hornet. 

Toil for a living in such conditions as this world 
furnishes is a daily discomfort. Human labor is 
heavily weighted with human wrongs and humilia- 
tions. The common conception of it is that of 
conflict with other men. A battle with the world, 
we call it : as if another man's success were our 
failure. Competitions, heart-burnings, rivalries, 
deceits, overreachings, treacheries, enmities, and 
oppressions make up large portions of the life of 
trade. Penitentiaries and dungeons are symbols 
of our laws. Both are constructed for self-defense. 
We have little notion of what labor for a living 
would be in a world not racked and ruined by sin. 
Think of a store of jewelry, or a bank, without 
lock or bolt ! Imagine a world in which protec- 
tive laws and retributive penalties should be un- 
known ! Conceive of a world in which no state 
should contain a prison, and no county a jail ; and 
in which a rifle and a revolver should be unintel- 
ligible relics of a lost art ! What a life of labor 
in such a world would be, labor in this world is 
not. 

To encounter happily the conditions of self- 
support in this world, we need to make life a 
continuous prayer. We must retire into God's 
silence, in the stillness of a state of prayer. We 
need that condition of things of which Emerson 
gives us a glimpse, when he says, " When a man 
lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 303 

murmur of a brook and the rustle of the corn." 
Poets send us to the works of nature for it. Very 
good, if in the works of nature we discover God's 
thoughts. Men in the tug of life and the antago- 
nisms of trade must know where to find the lull 
which nothing else gives to a perturbed spirit but 
the consciousness of being one with a personal 
God. This is the Psalmist's thought, when he 
speaks of the "light of God's countenance." With- 
out this divine incandescence, nature is a cheat. 
An oak is no more than a bramble-bush. Orion 
is no more than a firefly. Nothing above, beneath, 
around, has in it the divine idea. Nothing, there- 
fore, gives help or compensation. 

Sir Fowell Buxton was engaged for twenty 
years in the British Parliament, in a conflict with 
almost all the dominant forces of the empire, for 
the emancipation of the slaves. To this he added 
the distracting cares of an immense business inher- 
ited from his father. Near the close of his life he 
wrote to his son, "The experience of my life is, 
that events always go right when they are under- 
taken in the spirit of prayer. I have found assist- 
ance given, and obstructions removed, in a way 
which has convinced me that some secret power 
has been at work." 

This is what we all need, — ability to carry on 
the complicated affairs of a laborious life with a 
sense of rest in a secret force, not our own, which 
is all the while co-operating with us. Meditation 
and prayer are twin-helpers to this spiritual repose. 



304 My Study: and Other Essays. 

The habit of " undertaking things in the spirit of 
prayer " is the secret of happiness in a life of toil. 
The busiest and most heavily burdened life is full 
of spiritual analogies, by the aid of which thought 
may alternate in quick succession between earth 
and heaven. Thus the most intense and diversified 
life may be enclosed in God's life, and made tribu- 
tary to His plans. In no other way can we live in 
sympathy with God, or be assured of His sympathy 
with us. 

The fact deserves emphasis, that prayer, as a 
continuous state of religious living, is independent 
of conditions. No calamity of life can overpower 
it, or make it untimely. It becomes an atmosphere, 
pure, life-giving, tonic, invariable. It is difficult 
for religious moods to exist under its equal press^ 
ure. In glad hours, it is a joy ; and in sad hours, 
a comfort. It keeps life in equilibrium against 
disturbing forces. Like a finely finished chro- 
nometer, it is self-adjusting to variations of tem- 
perature. St. Paul struck out a scintillation of 
its virtue, when he said, " If God be for us, who 
can be against us ? " We believers of the common 
stock come to it often as a discovery which takes 
us by surprise. We respond, "Surely enough. 
Who ? Where is the fury of the oppressor ? " 

Yet another fact deserves mention. It is, that 
every human life contains peculiarities of proba- 
tionary trial. Every man finds that Ms lot is, in 
some respects, singular. As no two faces are 
alike, no two lives are the same in point of disci- 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 305 

pline. Each one seems to be singled out for a test 
of character, which no other one is called to bear 
with the same degree of severity. 

The proverb says that every house has its skele- 
ton. It is more forcibly true, that every man has 
his thorn. St. Paul had his : we all follow in our 
several ways. One, like the apostle, has his thorn 
in bodily disease. A disease develops itself, of 
which he says, " Any thing but this ! " Another 
discovers his burden in an infelicity of tempera- 
ment, which keeps him in a chronic state of self- 
contempt. A third is prematurely, and, as it 
seems to him, ruthlessly, retired from active use- 
fulness, in which he does not think it vanity in 
him to believe that he did the world some service. 
He vexes himself in secret with the problem why 
God should have deprived Himself of so valuable 
an auxiliary. A fourth thinks he is selected — and 
perhaps he is — for one of those clusters of sorrows 
which have created the proverb, that " misfortunes 
never come singly." 

Some men succumb to such peculiarities of dis- 
cipline. Faith expires. Any thing else they could 
have borne, but why this ? Another man's trials 
they could have met serenely, but their own seem 
a great mystery. It is not difficult to most of us 
to bear the troubles of other men. But, when our 
own are the test of faith, no spirit is left in us, if 
we belong to the class of these elect sufferers. 
The whole head is sick, and the whole heart 
faint. 



306 My Study: and Other Essays. 

For such specialities of probationary destiny, 
we need a special welcome to the recesses of the 
hidden friendship of God. Else we may come 
suddenly to the border-line of despair. Every 
man carries the possibility of suicide in his des- 
tiny. We can never know what might have been, 
but for the loving care of God in forestalling our 
weakness in critical exigencies. To gain the refuge 
of such hidden life, we need unwavering fellowship 
with Christ. We need sometimes to rise up with 
Him a great while before day, and to depart into 
a solitary place, continuing all night in prayer; 
" the morning-star finding Him where the evening- 
star left Him." 

Great emergencies are the final test of great 
forces. If ever a suspense of faith in a life of 
prayer might reasonably take place, we should 
imagine that such a collapse would attend that 
extreme of human woe in which reason itself gives 
way. What can prayer do for a mind which has 
ceased to be a mind? What result an induction 
from the history of insane-asylums might give, I 
do not know. But, in the unwritten history of 
insanity, facts are not wanting, which, so far as they 
go, tend to prove that the long use of prayer in 
the habits of a healthy religious life generates a 
remedial force which reaches over into the mind's 
derangements and entanglements, and helps to 
bring it again into self-possession. Having long 
moved in the grooves of prayer, the lost mind, by 
means of those grooves, has sometimes found its 



Prayer as a State of Christian Living. 307 

way back to the living world. An instance from 
real life will illustrate this. 

Many years ago a clergyman in New England, 
after a long period of godly service, became, as his 
physicians and friends believed, hopelessly insane. 
So far as the diagnosis of cerebral disease could 
determine, remedy was impossible. They only 
waited, praying for his release. His delusions, 
among other vagaries, took at last the form of reli- 
gious melancholy. The unpardonable sin weighed 
grievously upon his conscience. He told his at- 
tendants, that he had been, through all his life, a 
hypocrite. He thought it had been revealed to 
him that he was going to hell. He had been told 
that no other place in the universe was fit for him, 
or he for it. The calmness of despair brooded over 
his days and nights. 

It was useless to reason with a mind which had 
no reason. But at last, one of his clerical brethren 
resolved on an experiment. He said to his afflicted 

brother substantially this: "Well, Dr. B , it 

may be true. If God has revealed it to you, it 
must be so. Doubtless, some appalling examples 
of hypocrisy and retribution must be held up as a 
warning to the universe, and you may be one of 
them. Will it not be wise for you to lay your 
plans for it, till you are otherwise instructed, and 
think what you will do in hell ? You will not wish 
to be surprised there by an unknown experience. 
What will you do with yourself ? How will you 
fill up the time there ? " At this weird suggestion, 



308 My Study : and Other Essays. 

the good man's religious faith first righted itself, 
and sprang into its wonted channel of operation. 
He replied, "I will pray the very first thing. I 
will set up a prayer-meeting the very first day ! " 
At that juncture of tangled thought, in which he 
" saw men as trees walking," his reason began to 
right itself. That also sprang into its accustomed 
logical grooves. He thought it at first to be a new 
discovery, that wherever a sinner could pray, and 
where God was within hearing, that could not be 
hell. From this feeble hold upon his old trains of 
ideas, he proceeded till his old faith came back to 
him in full, and with it his old thinking-power. 
He lived for a short time after, and died in full 
possession of his faculties and his Christian faith. 

Isolated facts like these must not be laden with 
inferences which they do not bear. But taken in 
connection with other facts illustrative of the sani- 
tary effect of religious services, and specially of 
Christian song, upon the condition of the insane, 
they do give something more than the interest of 
conjecture to the idea that a profound affinity 
exists between worship and mental health. Prayer 
is an element of moral being which life craves. 
Why should it not be a remedial agent in mental 
disease ? Nothing in psychological or physical 
science hints the contrary. 



XXIII. 

WHY DO I BELIEVE CHRISTIANITY TO BE A 
REVELATION FROM GOD? 

Aisr esteemed correspondent requests me to give 
publicly an answer to this inquiry. In reply, I 
must premise that my faith in Christianity is large- 
ly an inheritance. I trace it back through the 
life-blood of nine generations of godly forefathers. 
I am not vain enough to believe that I have any 
such independence of ancestral influences that I 
can approach the question in a state of mental 
equipoise. I do not believe such a state to be 
either necessary or desirable. The laws of hered- 
ity are among the factors which create any wise 
man's belief in a system of religion. The attempt 
to be rid of them can only create a bias the other 
way. They may be reasonably tested : they can 
not be reasonably ignored. 

In testing my ancestral faith, I find it confirmed 
by the following facts ; namely, — 

1. In examining the sacred books of Christian- 
ity, I find there a Person whose being seems to me 
to be a supernatural disclosure of God. Jesus 
Christ is the great miracle of history. I can not 
reconcile His character and life with the theory 

309 



310 My Study: and Other Essays. 

that He was man only. I do not know enough of 
the psychology of infinite being to deny the pos- 
sibility, or even to question the probability, that 
deity and humanity are blended in one person. It 
is as likely to be true as the opposite. It must be 
determined, as other possible things are, by cred- 
ible proofs. Those proofs point to such a mysteri- 
ous blending in the person of Jesus Christ. Napo- 
leon expressed the natural belief of a fair-minded 
man of the world who came to the question with 
a balanced mind open to the weight of evidence, 
when he said, " I know man, and I declare to you 
that Jesus Christ was not a mere man." If Jesus 
was not God, His words disprove His honesty, and 
His actions disprove His good sense. 

In the four fragmentary narratives of His birth 
and life and death, I find peculiarities which are 
unparalleled in biographical literature. No evi- 
dence appears of imbecility or insanity or knavery. 
Yet one of these must be true of Him if He was a 
man, and no more. He makes assertions respect- 
ing the significance of His own Being to all man- 
kind, which no honest man would make in his 
right mind if he were man only. He assumes an 
authority and a relationship to the Most High, 
which a sane man could not • honestly make if he 
were not in some mysterious sense conscious of 
identity with the Most High. He takes upon 
Himself the responsibility of a mission to this 
world which no man could believe to be laid upon 
himself, and could seriously undertake to discharge, 



Christianity a Revelation from God. 311 

without a loss of reason, unless it were accom- 
panied by a consciousness of divine power to sus- 
tain it. 

By the laws of mental disease as recognized by 
sanitary science, a mind conscious of only human 
resources, and yet honestly believing itself to be 
the Saviour of a fallen world through atoning 
pains, should become a maniac. The mental equi- 
poise of this mysterious Being under the disclos- 
ures of His mission to His own consciousness, and 
in the awful solitude of it, as it advanced to its 
fulfillment, is itself a miracle. It is a token of a 
Power within, not limited by human conditions, 
nor subject to human infirmities. It is not in 
human nature to bear the consciousness of such a 
mediatorial relation between God and man with- 
out a wreck of reason hopeless and irremediable. 
The psychological phenomena developed by the 
life of this anomalous Person are inexplicable upon 
any theory of His nature, but that affirmed by St. 
John, " The Word was with God, and the Word 
was God." 

2. I find, further, in the teachings of this anom- 
alous Being, the germs of a system of ethics which 
can not be of human origin. That is to say, it is 
unlike man as he has expressed himself in other 
ways. Fragments of it are found elsewhere. But 
as a whole, and specially in its freedom from 
absurdities and excrescences, it stands alone in the 
history of human thought. It is as remarkable for 
what it does not say, as for what it does. In the 



312 My Study: and Other Essays. 

truthfulness and power of its appeal to the best 
intuitions of the human mind, it is unequaled. I 
can not account for it on any other theory so prob- 
ably as on that which derives it from the mind of 
God. 

Other religions profess to be founded on sacred 
books. They contain the elements of ethical sys- 
tems. In the form of aphorism and of ritual, they 
attempt a moral government of human life. One 
feature marks them all as the work of imperfect 
mind, and of mind debilitated in its intellectual 
processes by moral infirmities. It is the inter- 
mingling with fragmentary truth of much that is 
false, much that is petty, and much that is impure. 
They are in this respect such as might reasonably 
be expected from an uninspired human intellect. 
If Christianity were of human origin, we should 
look for similar excrescences in its ethical teach- 
ings. We do not find them. We find nothing 
that lowers the dignity of moral truth, and noth- 
ing that offends the purity of a good conscience. 
It is the only religion known to history which 
appreciates woman. This is a remarkable hint of 
its probable origin. Taken by itself, isolated from 
other evidences of its source, the Christian ethics 
would not be proof conclusive that Christianity is 
from God; but its character fits in with other 
proofs so strikingly that no other theory of its 
origin is so probable. 

3. I find in other teachings of the Christian 
books, and especially in the Epistles of the New 



Christianity a Revelation from Grod. 313 

Testament, the germs of a system of theologic 
belief which does not impress me as being from 
unaided human sources. No other religion has 
taught its equal. The sacred books of no other 
faith have contained its like. The true way to 
test its character is to imagine it blotted out of 
human history. Blot out all that it has contrib- 
uted to human thought. What then? Would 
any thing remain worthy to be compared with it ? 
What answer would Plato have given to this ques- 
tion? My conviction is, that when Plato longed 
for a teacher sent from heaven, the Pauline theol- 
ogy would have satisfied the longing. He would 
have said, " This is the system which my mind has 
craved." Therefore I must believe that the most 
probable, the only probable, theory of its origin is 
that, through inspiration of its human authors, it 
came from the Infinite Mind. 

4. I find, moreover, in these sacred books, evi- 
dences of a growth which makes them one in 
structure and in aim. Ideas are started at the be- 
ginning which are expanded and deepened at the 
end. The Book of Leviticus is fulfilled in the 
Epistles to the Hebrews and Galatians. The sac- 
rifice of Abel finds its interpretation in the cruci- 
fixion of Christ. One continuous chain of history, 
of prophecy, and of moral teaching, runs through 
the whole. No other succession of thought in the 
history of literature discloses such a unity in the 
result, or any approach to it. It is incredible that 
men of different ages and nations, and formed by 



314 My Study: and Other Essays. 

different languages and types of civilization, should 
have planned this unity of construction, and exe- 
cuted it with conscious purpose. Human produc- 
tions of successive ages do not so lap over upon 
each other, in one consistent and consecutive 
design. Back of this anomaly in literature, there 
must have been one overruling and inspiring Mind. 
That mind can be none else than the mind of God. 
On the same principle on which I infer from the 
revelations of geology, an intelligent and continu- 
ous design in the construction of the earth's strata, 
I must infer the working of the same mind in the 
construction of the Bible. If the one can be the 
work of chance, or of impersonal law, the other 
may be. 

5. I find this unity of the biblical structure 
becoming the more marvelous when I discover the 
central idea at which the whole is aimed. Start- 
ing with the primeval fact of expiatory sacrifice, I 
find this volume developing through a complicated 
ritual, and through the revelations of centuries, a 
way of salvation, which is adjusted to the pro- 
foundest cravings of our nature in the emergency 
of sin. It answers, as no other book has ever 
done, the great question of the ages, " How shall 
man be just with God ? " It appeases, as no other 
religion has ever done, the wrath of a remorseful 
conscience. My nature springs in response to it, 
as does that of other men. 

In this respect, it stands in marvelous accord 
with the cravings of the human mind, yet in 



Christianity a Revelation from G-od. 315 

astounding contrast with all human devices to 
meet and satisfy those cravings. Other religions, 
as remedial systems designed to effect man's deliv- 
erance from guilt, are stupendous failures — melan- 
choly proofs of man's need of a redemption which 
he is powerless to achieve. Christianity is the 
only religion which the human conscience ap- 
proves as adequate to satisfy its own retributive 
sentiment, while it satisfies the same sentiment in 
the mind of God. I can not believe this way of 
deliverance from the catastrophe of sin, so perfect 
in its adjustments to the moral nature of both God 
and man, to have been a human invention. It is 
just like God to have devised it. It is unlike man. 
I must believe it to be the thought of God. 

6. I find, still further, the process by which the 
biblical religion has grown to its maturity accom- 
panied by events and revelations which are mir- 
aculous in their character. This book is largely 
historical in its materials. It is history seen and 
foreseen. A segment seems to be selected from 
the experience of mankind, and a divine plan 
wrought into its development. The evidence of 
this is scattered along the line, from its beginning 
to the end, in these supernatural occurrences. 
They appear whenever and wherever such occur- 
rences seem to have been needed to attest the 
presence and agency of God. They are of all 
varieties in detail, from the fulfillment of a dream 
to the raising of the dead. The object of them 
was of such transcendent dignity as to justify 



316 My Study: and Other Essays. 

belief in miracle. They convinced contemporaries 
that they were supernatural in their character. I 
must believe, that, if I had been a witness to them, 
they would have convinced me of the same. By 
the laws of human testimony, I am bound to believe 
it now. They add to other evidences all the weight 
of present miracle in proof that the Book which 
records them is the Word of God. 

7. The confirmation of my faith is reduplicated 
by the singular resemblance which I discover be- 
tween the Christian religion and that taught by 
the phenomena of the natural world. The two 
are so remarkably alike, that they must be expres- 
sions of the same creative Mind. Each supports, 
by its alliance, the credit of the other. The mate- 
rial world is so replete with analogies, linking it 
with the revelations of the Scriptures, that, in one 
aspect of it, it seems as if it were created to illus- 
trate and prove those revelations. Both teach 
the existence of the same God. Both proclaim the 
same attributes of His nature. Both affirm the 
same sacredness of Law. Both teach the same 
conceptions of the evil of sin. So far as the reli- 
gion of nature goes, it covers the same ground 
with that of the Christian books. The Being who 
created the heavens and the earth must be the 
Being who constructed the Bible. 

So far as the Bible differs in its teachings from 
the book of Nature, it is but an advance, not a 
contradiction, not an independent and dissimilar 
record. The peculiarities of the biblical religion 



Christianity a Revelation from God. 317 

are those which the religion of nature leads us to 
expect. Nature teaches man's need of a revela- 
tion, and of such a revelation. Nature suggests 
what Christianity affirms. Nature inquires, and 
Christianity answers. Nature promises, and Chris- 
tianity fulfills. Nature brings man to the Christian 
books, needy, craving, expectant : the books sup- 
ply the need, satisfy the craving, and realize the 
expectation. This unity of a dual revelation of 
God is too manifest and significant to be ignored. 

8. I find, in following the history of Christianity 
from the completion of the canon of its sacred 
books, one thing more. My faith in it as a revela- 
tion from God is confirmed by the faith of other 
minds. Mohammed recognized an important factor 
in all human beliefs, when he said that the faith 
of Fatima, then the only believer in his pretensions, 
strengthened his own. Such are the relations of 
the human mind to truth, that, what one mind 
believes, another mind has, so far forth, reason to 
believe. Applying this to the history of Christian- 
ity, the confirmation of individual faith becomes 
overwhelming. Success is not alone evidence of 
truth, but it is an immense tribute to the evidence 
drawn from other sources. 

It is much to the purpose, therefore, that I find 
among the believers of Christianity those who, by 
proximity in time, were, of all men, best qualified 
to judge of the historic facts which it affirms. 
Following them, I see a long succession of believ- 
ers, not the great and the wise alone, not the 



318 My Study: and Other Essays. 

ignorant and the weak alone, not the more impul- 
sive sex alone, but minds of both sexes, of all 
ages, of every variety of condition and culture. 
Children and philosophers alike have found re- 
sources of moral strength in its teachings. It has 
swayed a larger proportion of the thinking-power 
of mankind than was ever given to any other 
system of religion or philosophy. It has created 
the most magnificent literatures and the most 
advanced civilization in history. Its great ideas 
have been central to the most vital reforms which 
men have achieved in government, and in the 
unwritten laws of social life. It has accomplished 
what no other religion has attempted in the eleva- 
tion of woman. It is, above all others, the reli- 
gion of culture, of freedom, and of progress. The 
faith men have given to it has thus proved itself 
to be a working faith, such faith as men give only 
to things of supreme worth. Its believers have 
borne witness to it in the face of torture, and at 
the cost of life. Women have been buried alive 
in testimony to its truth. Children have been 
crucified rather than to betray it. Every form of 
human testimony which a religion can have, this 
religion has commanded for ages. And this im- 
mense accumulation of human faith, which has 
created such magnificent history, has been given 
to it on the ground that it is the religion of a 
Book inspired by God. 

This confirmatory evidence proves to me that it 
is what it claims to be, — a religion for the world 



Christianity a Revelation from Gfod. 319 

and for all time. Other religions are local, national, 
tribal: this is world-wide. Other religions grow 
old, and become effete : this grows youthful in the 
increase of its age. Others are religions of the past : 
this is the religion of the future. It has become 
an axiom among wise men, that, if we wish to 
make any thing live to the end of time, we must 
identify it with the religion of Christ. This is 
just such a revelation as I should expect from a 
benevolent God to a world suffering for the want 
of a revelation. It is such as I could not reasona- 
bly hope for from any other source. 

In this faith I have rested for many years, with 
a mental repose unbroken by an hour of misgiving 
or wavering. If it is not true, nothing is true. If 
it is not from God, nothing is from God. If God 
has not disclosed Himself in it, He has not done 
so in the discoveries of geology and astronomy. 
Nature gives no hint of an intelligent Creator and 
a benevolent Ruler of the universe, if the Chris- 
tian Scriptures are not the work of an almighty 
and omniscient Author. The religion of Christ 
and the religion of Nature stand or fall together 
in their claims to the faith of the human mind. 



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